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WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 
ABOUT EDUCATION 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 
ABOUT EDUCATION 

AND OTHER PAPERS 
AND ADDRESSES 



BY 

ERNEST CARROLL MOORE 



NetD gotk 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1919 

All rights reserved 










COPTBISHT, 1919, 

bt the macmillan company. 



Set up »nd electrotyped. Published June, 1919, 



M -'^ 1^'^ 



J. S. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



ICI.A515780 



MY MOTHER 



PREFACE 

The war has been the proving stage of two colossal 
experiments in education. The first began some 
forty years ago in Germany at the time that her 
autocratic government initiated its plans for the 
subjugation of the world. That experiment is the 
most remarkable demonstration of the power of 
teaching in the history of men. The second was 
the colossal undertaking in which the United States, 
profiting by the errors and successes of France and 
England, trained and equipped a huge citizen army 
and within a twelvemonth of the induction of its 
soldiers transported them to France and with them 
had begun the battles which brought about the de- 
struction of the enemy. That is the most convinc- 
ing proof of the possibilities of specific intensive 
instruction which the world has yet seen. 

Both experiments magnify purposeful training. 
In Germany the ritualistic instruction in the so- 
called liberal arts, which we formerly relied upon to 
produce citizens of humanity and culture, went on 
side by side with an intense pounding in of patriot- 
ism. It did little to check the momentum which 
that purposive indoctrination attained. Purposive 
instruction in the very rudiments of civics, history, 
and geography had to be evoked in every army 
camp in the United States to make good the very 
manifest shortcomings of a schooling that had con- 

vii 



viii PREFACE 

tented itself with formal discipline and a more or 
less ritualistic occupation with school studies. If 
the war has taught us anything, it has taught us 
that general education, whether of the formal dis- 
cipline type or of the merely aimless-keeping-com- 
pany- with-studies sort, cannot be relied upon. We 
who teach must sharpen our purposes, for unless 
our students work purposively they do not work at 
all. 

That, in its several phases, is the theme of the 
papers and addresses in this book. They were not 
prepared to be brought together in this way. The 
reader will find repetitions for which we must ask 
his indulgence. They are due to the fact that the 
volume is a collection of papers and addresses rather 
than a consecutive treatment of a unitary theme. 

Our thanks are due to the Educational Review for 
permission to reproduce the paper on Contemporary 
Ideals in Education; to the Yale Review for per- 
mission to reproduce the paper Why We Get On 
So Slowly; to School and Society for permission 
to reproduce the matter in Chapters II, III, VI, 
VII, VIII, and IX; to Education for permission 
to reprint the paper on General Discipline; and to 
a score of friends for most helpful collaboration. 

The great war has already taught us much about 

education; day by day it will teach us more for 

many years to come. It is far too early to finally 

assess its lessons. It is not too early to ask what 

they may be. 

Ernest C. Moore 
Los Angeles 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGES 

I. Contemporary Ideals in Education . . 1-25 

II. The Child in Modern Society . . . 27-41 

III. Is the Stress which is Now being Put upon 
THE Practical Interfering with the 
Idealistic Training of Our Boys and 
Girls? . 42-56 

rV. Why We Get On so Slowly . . . 57-75 

V. The Doctrine of General Discipline . 76-94 

VI. Does the Study of Mathematics Train the 

Mind Specifically or Universally.? . 95-119 

VII. Mathematics AND Formal Discipline Again 120-128 

VIII. Does the Study of Mathematics Train the 
Mind Specifically or Universally.'* 
A Reply to a Reply .... 129-151 

IX. Formal Discipline and the Teaching of 

Literature 152-165 

X. Formal Discipline and the Study of the 

Classics 166-181 

XI. What is History and Why Do We Want It ? 182-196 

XII. Religious Education and the War , . 197-211 

XIII. Our Undertaking and Why We Undertake 

It Now 212-228 

ix 



X TABLE OF CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGES 

XIV. What the War Teaches Us about Edu- 
cation 229-243 

XV. Education by Immediate Objectives . 244-270 

Appendix 

The English Education Act of 1918 . . 273-317 

The American Education Bill . . . 319-327 

The German Education Program . . . 328-330 

Index 331-334 



WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 
ABOUT EDUCATION 



WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 
ABOUT EDUCATION 

CONTEMPORARY IDEALS IN 
EDUCATION 1 

In these distressful days when each one of us at 
times feels that the way of life which we call civilized 
may be lost and forgotten, it is imperative that we 
take stock of the forces which we can employ to per- 
petuate it among men. Surely the name for our age 
is that which Fichte gave to his, *'The Age of com- 
pleted sinfulness." Such horrors as are now known, 
such suffering as is now felt, the race has never known 
before. Indeed if all the other wars, pestilences, 
famines, cataclysms, and devastations which have 
afflicted mankind since the beginning of recorded 
time were added together into one great horror, it 
is a question whether their sum total would equal 
this single one which goes on now. Have they who 
did this thing no pity, no bowels of compassion, no 
care for the one little life which is all we have that 
they make nothing of it and crush it out so ruth- 
lessly? Surely colossal madness has done this, 
for sanity could not even imagine it. But no, it is 
all due to ideals, all the result of teaching. 

lAn address before the City Club of Chicago, May S, 1916. 

B 1 



2 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

Yet there is another side to the picture. It has 
been met by something stronger than it is. Never 
before since history began has the irresistible and 
triumphant power of an idea so manifested itself as 
now. Thought is again made flesh and dwells 
among us, and we who are so fortunate as to be 
alive behold its power. Such devotion to the old 
fidelities, such eagerness to serve, such patience 
under suffering, such a sublime surrender of goods, 
of cherished plans, of friends, of self itself, that an 
idea may live, that an ideal may triumph, as takes 
place at every instant of time in Europe, this world 
has never seen before. We may indeed say to each 
other what JSschines said to his fellows who were 
alive in the day of Alexander, and we may say it 
to each other with better right than he said it : 
"We live not the life of mortals, but are born at 
such a moment of time that posterity will relate our 
prodigies." 

W^en their Homer shall arise to tell of these great 
deeds as half -forgotten things, he will not sing of 
wrath or power of armaments or over-confident, long- 
labored efficiency. He will sing of ideals, of human 
hatred of wrong, of sacrifice for social laws, of irre- 
sistible love of liberty. These are invisible things, 
but they are stronger than visible things and deter- 
mine them. Ideals are always that, they are per- 
sonal ; they exist nowhere but in minds ; they do 
not float in the air or belong to things. They belong 
always to folks. They are the thoughts, the hopes, 
the plans, the resolutions of people. They are not 
fancies or opinions, but purposes, principles, resolves. 



CONTEMPORARY IDEALS IN EDUCATION 3 

The ideals of this nation are the thoughts of what this 
nation is going to do, has got to do, that you and I 
and the rest of folks in it have, and the ideals of 
education in this country are the thoughts of what 
education is for, and must do, that you and I and 
the rest of folks in our land have. 

I have sometimes fancied a visitor coming to Har- 
vard University and asking to be shown the real 
university. One of the guides might take him into 
The Yard and point out the buildings to him and 
say these are the real university ; or another guide 
might produce for him a list of the endowment funds 
and say this is the real university; or another one 
might show him a book which contains the history 
of the university : — Harvard guides are, I regret to 
say, rather too prone to do that. He might take 
him to Mt. Auburn and show him certain rather 
numerous plain and simple graves there, and say 
this is the real university, or might show him the 
roll of the alumni, or the assembled student body, 
or the faculty gathered in faculty meeting, or the 
laboratories, and the library; and I have imagined 
the visitor turning away in each case and asking : 
What brings all these together here? What is the 
purpose that built these buildings, that brought this 
money, that constituted this history, that assembled 
these professors both living and dead, that collects 
these students? Show me that, for that shapes all 
the rest, that is the real university. Or, I have 
imagined that same discerning visitor coming from 
Europe and asking to be shown the real United 
States, and when pointed to the land bounded on 



4 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

the east by the Atlantic, on the south by Mexico, 
on the west by the Pacific and on the north by 
Canada, saying that was all here before Columbus 
came, yet he did not find any United States here. 
That is the territory of the United States. Show 
me the real United States. And next he would, 
perhaps, be directed to go to Washington and look 
at the White House and the Supreme Court and the 
assembled Congress, but would at once say no, that 
is the Government of the United States. Look 
then at all these 100,000,000 people, he would be 
told. But no, they are the people of the United 
States. I want to see what makes these states and 
what unites them. And Socrates-like he would then 
go about from this man to that saying to each of 
them, "Speak that I may see thee," and from what 
he found that they desired with all their hearts, 
souls, minds, and strength he would decide whether 
there is indeed any real United States. Ideals are 

^ our very life blood ; they pay our debts ; they send 
us to our work in the morning; they keep us from 
taking our neighbors' property, from turning des- 
troyer and pillaging, burning, and trampling out 

\ lives. 

You are that discerning visitor. You ask me to 
show you the real education of our country. You do 
not want to be shown the buildings, or the funds or 
the teachers or the textbooks or the students. This 
is to be no tabulation of plant, equipment, resources, 
personnel or results, no journey through a museum 
to look at specimens. It is the animating purpose 
of this great enterprise that you wish me to consider 



CONTEMPORARY IDEALS IN EDUCATION 5 

and I most gladly comply, but with a reservation. 
France is a real thing ; you can not touch it or see it 
or hear it ; it is a mental thing, a desire, a thought, 
a determination that men by thousands set aside life 
for nowadays. Suppose you were to go among the 
soldiers at Verdun and among the women that work 
and pray for them at home and ask the question of 
each one of them. What is France ? You would get 
strangely different answers. I, too, am a private, or 
at most a drill sergeant in a vast army. I can not 
speak with certainty for the others. I can tell you 
only what education is to me and what I believe it is 
to them. 

Education itself is an ideal. When our ancestors 
were still "extreme gross," to use a phrase from 
Francis Bacon, they took no thought for it. Indeed 
we can imagine a world in which grown folks in 
cataclysmal selfishness practiced destroying all their 
young as soon as they were born. Our race has, 
you know, at various times and in different ways 
destroyed a good many of them. A race which 
followed that practice would soon die out. But why 
not.f^ If we were in fact as completely selfish as 
many of our makers of opinion give us credit for 
being, we would not and could not care. But we do 
care. We want them to live. All education is 
rooted in that unselfishness, is grounded in that 
ideal. It is that something in us which makes us 
child-keepers, that makes schools and teachers and 
meetings like this, and child-labor laws, and horrible 
revulsion when young lives are wantonly trampled 
out. 



6 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

Again, we can imagine a society in which every 
parent took the greatest pains to teach his child to 
lie, and to teach him to steal, and to teach him to kill, 
and to do no work for himself but to force others to 
do everything for him, to be a destroyer, to delight 
in anger, to value brawling, to indulge every passion 
as his right, to disobey all laws, to turn a deaf ear 
to all pleadings, to look upon compassion as 
cowardice, and not to fear death but to look forward 
to endless eons of joy in another world provided 
only that he took the precaution to die fighting. 
Such a training would bring up children to rend their 
parents and destroy each other. The result would be 
exactly the same as if the parents destroyed all the 
children at birth, only it would be longer in coming. 

There would not be the slightest difference in the 
long run between this method of bringing up children 
and destroying them outright. But just this kind 
of education has been solicitously inculcated in 
various places and at various times in the world's 
history. Why is it not given now? It is, not all 
of it, but part of it, in every country. Why do you 
object to it.^ Because it threatens us, because it 
destroys lives. The education which we seek must 
not be of that kind. It must have just one object, 
to serve life, and one justification, that it serves it. 
By life we do not mean mere existence but a certain 
kind of existence. Our want of it is more real than 
anything else we know. For the sake of it men suffer 
wounds, are torn asunder, are impaled, yet count 
imprisonment, loss of possessions and agonizing 
death as little things beside the loss of their conviction 



CONTEMPORARY IDEALS IN EDUCATION 7 

that the good of men must be served. For the educa- 
tor that alone is the real thing. And the only reason 
we have such a thing as education at all is because 
of the value we put upon human lives. We talk 
much about our institutions of learning, about the 
subjects which we teach in them and about our devo- 
tion to the sciences. That is not what most of us 
mean at all. We use such phrases as "you must get 
knowledge for the sake of knowledge," "you must 
pursue science for the sake of science," but they are 
for most of us only a circumlocution. What we are 
really concerned for is the good of folks. In the 
service of education it is, alas, much easier to assign 
reasons which will satisfy our fellows and quiet 
objections than reasons which will do the business 
and produce the fruit of helping men to new and 
better experiences. What we are concerned with is 
knowledge as a means, not an end. Some time ago 
Professor Dewey told me that when he began to 
write his last book on the philosophy of education 
he made what was to him the startling discovery 
that all philosophy is philosophy of education. 
For, what other reason can there be for striving 
to have folks learn philosophy than that they may 
learn to think about life sanely? Is not the same 
thing true of all literature, all art, all science, all 
industry, all government, all religion, all morals? 
Have we any reason for caring for them save that our 
efforts in them conserve and augment human forces 
and make life a better thing? Has industry any 
other warrant than the production of goods for 
human use? Has science any other motive than 



8 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

that indicated by its motto, "I serve"? Has 
religion any other purpose than to inculcate helpful 
lessons about God and the life of our own souls? 
Has government any other reason for existing than 
to devise and secure the welfare of folks? All 
these exist to teach men to be free. I am therefore 
going to be more demanding than Professor Dewey 
was. I am going to say that all literature, all art, 
all science, all government, all religion is for edu- 
cation, that they have no other reason for existence 
than to teach folks to live well. We who teach 
are fabricating the future. We must build it out 
of all the discoveries concerning the life of man that 
man has made. 

But I must not, without stating the other one, 
allow you to commit yourselves to the view that all 
knowledge is nothing but a series of discoveries which 
men have made as to the best ways to think and act 
in order to live well here upon this planet ; that it 
has all grown out of the race's experimenting with 
life, that every single one of its formulations is only 
a body of recipes or guide-board directions advising 
us what to do or which road to take when certain 
conditions are met, and that every book is a guide- 
book to a country that the mind of the reader is 
likely to visit. This is the pragmatic view of the 
nature and function of knowledge, the only view 
which, as I believe, makes education either worth 
while or possible. For if all philosophy is philosophy 
of education, all education is an outcome or effect 
of philosophy and this philosophy of consequences 
is the only one which provides the parent and the 



CONTEMPORARY IDEALS IN EDUCATION 9 

teacher with a working definition of knowledge, 
which will tell him how to distinguish unerringly 
what lessons the child must learn from the infinite 
mass of pseudo-lessons which he might spend his 
time upon and be none the better or wiser for having 
done so. Let me give you some illustrations of 
just this need for distinguishing knowledge from 
facts, for selecting the matter which children should 
be taught from that which they should not be 
taught. This selection must be made in every sub- 
ject and the principle or ideal of utility is the only 
principle which helps us to make it. 

All children who go to school in our country must 
be taught to spell. But there are 400,000 words, 
more or less, in our language. Shall they be taught 
to spell all of them or only a part of them and if 
only a part, which part? What does a knowledge 
of spelling mean ? What does the teaching of spelling 
require the teacher to do ? There are two views : 
According to one, spelling is spelling, and to be a good 
speller means to be able to spell every word, or since 
that is absurd, almost every word and at least 
most of the hard words in the language. Those who 
take this position say that spelling is for the sake of 
spelling, the more of it one learns the better. The 
other view is that spelling is a very practical matter, 
we must all take pains to spell the words that we 
write. Each one of us has at least four vocabularies 
and of these our writing vocabulary is by far the 
smallest. The words which folks are likely to use in 
letters after they leave school, we should take partic- 
ular pains to teach each child to spell while he is in 



10 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

school. That number of words careful tests have 
shown to be no more than about 2000, while the num- 
ber of words which everybody uses is hardly more 
than 500. Now if we should follow the Cleveland plan 
of putting but two new words into each spelling lesson 
together with eight old ones, since there are more than 
150 days in each school year, we could perhaps in 
four years teach children to spell all the words which 
they are likely to have occasion to write, and to spell 
them correctly. As soon as we take the position that 
spelling is not for spelling, but for use, we can teach it 
successfully. As long as we cling to the view that 
spelling is for spelling we are so confused and un- 
certain that we get nowhere and no one is pleased 
with our attempts, ourselves and the children least 
of all. That we are not pleased may make but little 
difference, but that the children should because of 
our misguided efforts learn to hate learning is a 
tragedy more terrible and devastating even than the 
world war. 

An examination in geography was given in Boston 
a little while ago to 594 eighth grade students, 165 
third year high school students and 86 normal school 
students. The list which was submitted to them was 
carefully prepared and included such questions on 
the geography of the United States as : Locate New 
York City on the map. Locate San Francisco on 
the map. Why do the states just east of the Rocky 
Mountains receive less rain than Massachusetts? 
Explain the way in which the flood plains of the 
Mississippi river have been formed. Why are these 
flood plains good for agriculture ? And on the geog- 



CONTEMPORARY IDEALS IN EDUCATION 11 

raphy of Europe such questions as : Locate on the 
map two seaports of European Russia. Why does 
England import large quantities of wheat? Why 
has Germany become very important as a manu- 
facturing country? Out of the 845 pupils tested 
on the geography of Europe not a single pupil passed. 
In the test on the United States 8.7 per cent of the 
elementary school pupils, 4.8 per cent of the high 
school students and 1.1 per cent or one of the normal 
school pupils passed. Your conclusion is, doubtless, 
that they were either pretty poor students or that 
their teaching had been poor. That is not my con- 
clusion. A few days after this test had been given I 
was present at a meeting where these results were 
discussed. Everyone had practically reached the 
conclusion which you just now reached, when one 
of the men present asked, "How many facts would 
you say are brought to the attention of a public school 
child in his study of geography each year? As 
many as 10,000?" "Yes," was the reply, "fully as 
many as 10,000." When we study geography for 
facts you see we do not learn geography. 

The view that we study spelling for the sake of 
spelling, geography for the sake of geography, science 
for the sake of science, and knowledge of all kinds 
for the sake of knowledge, is due to the anti-prag- 
matic philosophy known as intellectualism. It says 
that the highest function of our minds is to know in 
order to know — that a subordinate function of them 
is to know in order to do. That knowledge in its truest 
form is knowledge wholly unmixed with volition, or 
knowledge that as somebody has said, thank God, no- 



12 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

body can possibly do anything with. "God hath 
framed the mind of man as a glass capable of the im- 
age of the universal world. . . . For knowledge is a 
double of that which is," said Bacon. According to 
the pragmatists God has done nothing of the sort, and 
we would be enormously handicapped and wholly help- 
less if he had. The fact that it is impossible for 
us to attend with the same intensity to everything 
which goes on, indicates that the mind is not a 
mirror to reflect images of everything which is, but 
a selecting device which works by picking out that 
which is worth while from that which is not worth 
while. This philosophy, then, commands educators 
to abandon their attempts to treat all that is known 
as equally valuable, and to impart universal knowl- 
edge to the young. It says that knowledge for the 
sake of knowledge, science for the sake of science, 
or art for art's sake, are monstrous shibboleths, that 
only confusion, misdirected effort and a wretched 
wasting of life result from them, that knowledge, 
science and art are all for man's sake, are tools, and 
must never be hypostatized into self-existent realities. 
So much for ideals about what we should teach. 
Next comes the question, What result should we 
seek when we teach it ? What does teaching these 
various lessons that the race has learned, and values, 
do for the learner.'^ Or, in other words, what is 
education ? Here so many ideals are held by teachers 
that I can not examine them all. I will select three 
for your consideration. The first is that education 
imparts knowledge — that teachers have it and 
students do not have it and students go to school that 



CONTEMPORARY IDEALS IN EDUCATION IS 

teachers or textbooks or both together may pass it 
over, hand it out, impart it or deUver it to them. 
Many people think schools are knowledge-shops, 
where pounds, ounces, pennyweights of knowledge are 
transferred to the young. They do this perhaps 
because they see teachers constantly engaged in 
testing their students to find out how much of what 
has been delivered to them they retain and can 
hand back again. But if you will stop for a moment 
and consider what sort of a thing knowledge is, you 
will see that no teacher can hand over or share his 
knowledge with his pupil any more than he can hand 
over or share his headache or his toothache with 
him. My knowledge is the body of sensations, 
perceptions, memories, images, thoughts, feelings, 
and volitions that I am aware of, somewhat reduced 
to order, classified and arranged so that when some- 
thing happens that calls for a reaction from me I am 
able to make that reaction and do what should be 
done next. If you speak to me in English I can 
answer you in English, for I have a knowledge of 
English words, but if you speak to me in Italian I 
can not answer you in Italian, for I have no knowledge 
of that language. If you ask me what 2 and 7 and 
9 make I can tell you, but if you put me into the 
midst of a battle and ask me what to do next, I can 
not tell you, nor can I do it if you give the commands, 
for I have not learned how to work by that action- 
system. We go to school to learn to use our own 
minds in the several most important ways in which 
the race has found it necessary to use minds, to learn 
to work by the action-systems that the race has 



14 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

learned to prefer. It is always our own thoughts 
that we learn to work with. If the teacher tells me 
that three and five make eight, I must think three and 
then five and I must combine them. If she says that 
Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492, 1 
must form a notion of what is meant by Christopher 
Columbus, by discovered, and by America, and I 
must work out or make my own notion of what 1492 
means. The teacher does not give me her thoughts. 
She can not. Nobody can. All she can do is to 
put me into a condition in which I must generate 
and make use of my own. 

The mistaken notion that education is the impart- 
ing of knowledge, the delivering or conferring or 
handing out of knowledge, with all the confusion and 
waste that follows from it in schools, is due to certain 
foolish statements which we allow ourselves to make 
concerning language. We say that it imparts 
thought or vehicles thought or expresses thought or 
conveys thought. It does nothing of the sort. 
Thoughts can not be sent from one person to an- 
other. They never pass through the air. They do 
not ride on words or leave us when we move our lips 
and disturb the air about us in such a way that that 
disturbance reaches the tympanum of an auditor. 
If I speak to you, you feel a sound, but you make your 
own meaning to fit that sound. If the sound is of a 
language strange to you, you say you can not make 
out what I mean. Language is only a system of 
signals. WTien I can make them out, I can under- 
stand what you mean, but the thought which I make 
to fit your sounds, your words, is my own thought. 



CONTEMPORARY IDEALS IN EDUCATION 15 

not yours. In place of saying that language imparts 
thought or conveys thought, we should say that 
language demands thought, or requires thought or 
necessitates thought or arouses thought or provokes 
it. The teacher is a provoker of thought, not 
one who purveys or supplies it, and the thought and 
knowledge which the student makes are his own. 
Education then simply puts him into conditions in 
which he, using what men have said and done in 
past time and what men say and do now as raw 
material for his own constructing, makes up his own 
mind about the matter and so builds up his own 
knowledge. 

The other mistaken ideal of education to which a 
great many teachers devote themselves and their 
students, as I believe altogether in vain, is not 
concerned with the imparting of knowledge but with 
the creating of mind. Those who follow this ideal 
seem to say that our minds are very imperfect things 
at birth, that they must be made over, improved, 
renovated, disciplined, sharpened, drawn out, made 
supple, developed and perfected. Do you remember 
the story of the man who went about the streets of 
an ancient city crying "new lamps for old " ? You 
say there never was such a man. Do not be too sure 
about it. The professors who hold this view go 
about crying "new minds for old," "new minds for 
old." They say that certain studies are valuable 
not because we can not possibly get along without 
knowing their content, but because they form b. sort 
of grindstone on which we must sharpen our in- 
tellects. I believe that this doctrine is a superstition 



16 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

and a baneful one, and that no other educational 
ideal begins to take such a toll of young lives as this 
one does. It is an idol which is worshiped chiefly 
in our colleges, but they make both enforced and 
voluntary converts to it in the high schools and 
voluntary converts to it in the elementary schools 
of our country. Ask the teacher of spelling or 
arithmetic or geography why he believes in spelling 
for the sake of spelling, or arithmetic which no one 
outside of school uses, or geography which one will 
never again refer to in life, or grammar the use of 
which no student understands, and he will tell you 
that it is because these lessons are good for the mind, 
they strengthen it, make it facile, increase its power 
and sharpen the wits of the young. But no teacher 
ever has to get inside the mind or do any burnishing 
or repair work there, no teacher ever has to add any 
cubits to its stature or build any additions to it. 
That simply can not be done. "Learning Greek 
teaches Greek, and nothing else; certainly not 
common sense, if that have failed to precede the 
teaching," said Browning. In the Harvard Club in 
Boston there is a room set apart for the use of the 
graduates of the Medical School, and over the fire- 
place in that room is an inscription, a motto which 
states in a sentence the ideal, the philosophy of the 
medical profession. It is this: "We dress the 
wound, God heals it." Now if we were to try to 
make a sound ideal for the teaching profession, a 
philosophy which we could all unite in following, 
what form should it take.^ This I think: "We 
train people to use their minds ; God makes them." 



CONTEMPORARY IDEALS IN EDUCATION 17 

That training is always specific, never general. It is 
always learning to do this, that or the other particular 
thing, never learning to act in general. 

What specific things shall we train them to do? 
You see, just as soon as you give up intellectuaUsm 
with its mirror-up-to-nature ideal and its knowledge- 
for-the-sake-of-knowledge slogan, you must take the 
position that knowledge is not a luxury, but an in- 
dispensable human necessity. It is not having it 
that makes it valuable, it is doing by its aid or with 
it. Knowledge therefore becomes different from 
facts ; it is what we do about facts ; it is learning to 
work with facts, making them come our way or 
getting ready for them by foreseeing them. That is, 
knowledge, real knowledge, is always a kind of 
skill. The person who has it is different from other 
folks in what he can do. To know French means to 
speak, write and read French, to know ethics means 
to be constrained to ethical thought and action, to 
know science means to maintain the suspended 
judgment rather than the snap judgment, to collect 
the necessary information and try out our mental 
conclusions before we assert them or act upon them. 
Though studies have curiously different kinds of names, 
some of them names ending in ing and other names 
ending in ic, y, or ry, that is due to some false notions 
on the part of the men who named them. They are 
all ing studies and serve no other purpose than to 
train us to use our own minds upon the matters of 
which they treat in the ways that the race has thus 
far found it most useful to work in its struggles to 
master these matters. According to this ideal every 



18 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

child goes to school for exactly the same reason that 
an apprentice goes to a blacksmith shop, i.e., to 
learn to work with or operate or use certain highly 
important social tools which the race has wrought 
out with which to perform its work. 

Every society teaches its children to think about 
the things which it cares for, to do the things which 
it values. The school is simply society's most con- 
scious effort to keep itself alive and to renew itself. 
It can not be the same in the different countries, for 
it is the chosen agency for realizing the national 
ideal. When Socrates was in prison awaiting exe- 
cution his friend Crito came to him and said : I have 
arranged everything. The prison doors are open. 
You can escape and cross the frontiers of Attica to 
'safety if you will. But, said Socrates, nothing is 
worth doing that must not first be thought about. 
Let us think about this. Injustice and death are of 
slight concern to a man who is innocent, but doing 
injury to his own soul is of great concern. And then, 
as you will recall, he imagines the personified Laws of 
Athens coming to him and asking him if he can be 
planning to destroy them. They say to him, "Did 
we not bring you into existence ? Was it not by our 
authority that your father married your mother and 
begat you? Are not those of us reasonable which 
commanded your father to train you in music and 
gymnastic ? . . . No one of us has hindered you or 
any other citizen after he comes of age and has 
examined our management of the city and finds 
that it does not please him from taking all that 
belongs to him and going wherever he pleases. . . . 



CONTEMPORARY IDEALS IN EDUCATION 19 

But whoever among you who after examining and 
seeing how we give judgment and manage the other 
affairs of the city, chooses to remain, pledges himself 
in very deed to abide by us and perform whatsoever 
we command." 

"The greatest discovery ever made by man," says 
Sir Henry Jones, "was made by the Greeks when 
cutting themselves free from the traditions of the 
ancient world they alighted upon the conception of a 
civil state where citizens should be free. The most 
momentous experiment of mankind is that of 
carrying out their conception to its ultimate con- 
sequences in a true democracy." That most momen- 
tous experiment we are carrying out. The means 
which the Athenians, though not of our blood, our 
true ancestors, chose, are the means which we choose. 
Our laws compel the parent to have his child trained 
in the elements of education. In this we try to carry 
on the early Athenian practice, to put into effect the 
advice of Plato and of Aristotle and to realize the 
effort which Charles the Great and Alfred the Great, 
with unerring vision of what is necessary to a state, 
made in vain. The child does not belong to his 
parents, but to the state, to organized society as a 
whole. The parents have duties to him but no 
property in him. He must, whether his parents are 
willing or are not willing, spend his earlier years as 
an apprentice to certain social activities which he 
will have to continue to perform as long as he lives. 
He must be taught to read and write and use the 
language of our country and work with the aid of 
numbers. He must build up his own notions of the 



20 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

world, become familiar with the songs and stories 
of his race, and come to a realizing sense of what 
sort of an undertaking he has inherited and what 
has already been attempted and accomplished in it 
before he came. 

These things have become so much a matter of 
second nature to us that their real meaning is over- 
looked. Is it of overwhelming importance to the 
people of the United States that every child shall 
learn to read.^^ Well, let us see. Many things are 
happening in this world, and in the lurid light re- 
flected from other lands we are able more clearly 
to discern the features of our own life. In the 
United States 96 per cent of the people can read, in 
Mexico 80 per cent of the people can not. Because 
of that, and because of that only, certain things 
happen in Mexico which could not possibly happen 
in the United States. One of them is that spoken 
words have an undue power there. If an orator 
stands on a street corner in Mexico and makes a 
fiery speech to the people telling them that their 
liberties are being stolen from them, that they must 
arm themselves and march against the tyrant and 
destroy him, the chances are perhaps about 90 to 
10 that a number of them will rush to arms at once 
and a new revolution will be on. WTiy.^^ Because 
not having the means to be critical, little arises in 
their minds to challenge and dispute that which 
they hear so convincingly uttered. Not being able 
to read they are the unwilling dupes of unprincipled 
adventurers who trade upon their eager credulity 
and buy and sell them to suit a private advantage. 



CONTEMPORARY IDEALS IN EDUCATION 21 

Surely the ability to read the yellowest journal in 
existence would make one more self-protective than 
that. Education exists to make men free, and 
teaching folks to read arms them with a means of 
self-protection by which they can checkmate the 
schemes of impostors. With a free press it makes 
public opinion possible. Teaching folks to write is 
not so clearly indispensable, but it does enable us to 
talk to our friends who are beyond the reach of our 
voices, it provides a nearly indestructible memory 
and is a requisite in many callings. Teaching them 
to number gives a sense of security against being 
cheated in the simple reckonings of life and enables us 
to understand the social arrangements of time and 
space. 

These are the three R's. The cry perpetually goes 
up in this land, now from this critic of the public 
schools, now from that, that they constitute the 
whole duty of elementary education, that whatsoever 
is more than these cometh of faddism and should 
be driven out. Is this sound? Let us go back to 
Mexico. John Stuart Mill used to say that social 
and political theories can not be tested in a laboratory, 
they do not lend themselves to experimental control. 
Yet political theories do display themselves upon a 
great stage, and if we will but take note of what is 
happening all about us, we shall find that it corrects 
our own theories and tells us much about our prob- 
lems. Even the person among us who is least 
informed about Mexico must have concluded from 
what he has read that one trouble with that unhappy 
country is lack of education. "Schools for the 



22 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

people" is a cry of the revolutionists, and despite 
the fact that they claim to have created fewer schools 
than they destroyed and that these schools lead but 
a precarious and fitful existence, the problem of 
Mexico no matter what else happens, whether home 
recovery or intervention, must be solved by her 
schools. What do we mean when we say that? 
What is the problem of Mexico? It is an Indian 
country. Of its 16,000,000 people 38 per cent are 
pure-blooded Indians, 43 are mixed, and but 19 per 
cent are whites. WHien Cortes came there in 1519 
he found the Indians living in tribes throughout 
the land and having few relations with their fellows 
of other tribes, save to make nearly incessant war 
upon them. Mirabeau said a hundred years ago 
that war is the national industry of Prussia. Well, 
war was the national industry of Mexico. WTien 
the Spaniards came they did not fuse the Indians 
into one people. They were not one people them- 
selves. Even to this day the king of Spain is not 
crowned king of Spain, but king of the Spains. 
Catalonia, Castile, Aragon, Granada and the other 
Spains sent their contingents to Mexico. They 
grouped themselves together, the men of each of the 
Spains by themselves in different parts of the coun- 
try; they maintained their own customs and their 
differences, and thus upon the antagonisms and 
repellencies of the ever-warring native tribes were 
superimposed the antagonisms and repellencies of 
mutually jealous conquerors who had never been one 
people. These differences did not heal themselves; 
they multiplied. The ills of Mexico are due to lack 



CONTEMPORARY IDEALS IN EDUCATION 23 

of unity. "The trouble with us," says one distin- 
guished Mexican, "is that we can not trust each 
other." The problem of Mexico is to create unity, 
to bring it to pass that her people shall learn to value 
the same things, to desire the same things, to hope 
for the same things, to strive for the same things; 
that is the problem of Europe also, and that is the 
problem of the United States. 

Each one of us is born a being separate from his 
fellows and from the surrounding things of nature. 
We must make two conquests and keep making 
them as long as we live. One of these is the con- 
quest of nature, the other is the conquest of social 
relations. The conquest of nature is relatively easy, 
but the conquest of social relations is so difficult 
that as yet but a mere beginning has been made 
in it. The earth produces food enough and to spare 
for all of us, but at this moment hundreds of thou- 
sands starve and millions go to death in paroxysms 
of unspeakable anguish. There is but one way out 
of it. It is the final word of religion, philosophy, 
literature, political theory and morals. It is the 
problem of education ; men, all men, must learn 
that they are brothers. 

How can we be brought to value the same things, 
to desire the same things, to hope for the same 
things and to strive for the same things? The 
problem of Mexico can not be solved by opening 
schools throughout the Republic and teaching every 
Mexican boy and girl merely to read, write and 
cipher, in them. Many of the most frantic de- 
stroyers of lives there have had that training. 



24 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

Teaching them to read may decrease their over- 
susceptibiHty to deception, but no amount of zeal 
in instructing them in the three R's only or of in- 
structing our people in them will convert them into 
one people, with a common consciousness, striving for 
a common ideal and helping each other to realize 
it. The state, said Aristotle, is a mutual under- 
taking of friends. It does not exist for the sake of 
alliance and security from injustice nor yet for ex- 
change and mutual intercourse, but for the good 
life. Animals and slaves can not form it, for they 
have no share in happiness or in a life of free choice. 
Christianity enlarged this Greek lesson to include 
the entire family of mankind. God is the Father 
of all ; all are his children ; life is the mutuareff ort 
of common humanity to assist each other, to value 
the same things, to desire the same things, to hope 
and work for the same things. Only as the state 
enables its citizens to do this can it be a state, and 
only as the people of a nation assist the peoples of 
other nations to do this can it be a nation. 

Unity of desire, unity of plan and aspiration, 
unity of resolution and of action, the lesson of unity 
must be taught in the schools of Mexico, and in 
the schools of England, France, Germany and the 
United States, and it must be the chief lesson which 
is taught there. In the light of this principle we see 
what the real studies are. They are not reading, 
writing and arithmetic, they are not the sciences 
or mathematics, valuable as these all are. They 
are not the languages studied merely for their 
disciplinary effect. They are those studies that 



CONTEMPORARY IDEALS IN EDUCATION 25 

take us up, as it were, on a high mountain and show 
us the kingdoms of this world, and the great pulsing 
vivid panorama of human effort and striving that 
goes on in them. The mission of these studies is to 
make us ever mindful of what in its long struggle 
mankind has attempted, hoped for, and done, that 
— in that most moving phase from the trenches — 
we may "carry on." I have often thought and often 
said if I were compelled to choose from among all 
the studies we teach one and only one for my child 
to learn, I'd rather have him learn the songs of our 
country than any other thing ; for there are certain 
sentiments too precious and too dear to be intrusted 
to the everyday forms of communication or even 
to be intrusted to that extraordinary form which we 
call poetry. We give those sentiments a more com- 
pelling power over us. We sing them and thus secure 
for them the peculiar privilege of saying themselves 
over and over again in our hearts. I'd choose 
these songs first, and after them poetry, stories, 
history, geography, ethics. In later years philos- 
ophy, literature and science would assert their 
claims. Disciplinary studies would be banished. 
Physical training would call for more attention even 
than it got in Greece. Each child would be taught 
the elements of a trade. No child would be taught 
anything that he could ever as long as he lived feel 
that he was through with. Efficiency would be the 
object, but not that lop-sided and deformed eflfi- 
ciency that comes from the ability to control things 
only, but that larger eflficiency that seeks first the 
welfare of the kingdom of men. What is taught 



26 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

would not be handed down on authority. Instruc- 
tion would not be a militarizing of the minds of the 
young. Each student should use his own mind, 
should think his own thoughts, should put his own 
values upon things and men and be convinced by his 
own conviction. Each student would study reading 
in order to read, arithmetic to become an arith- 
metician, geography in order to be his own geographer 
by continually studying the earth and man's relation 
to it, history that he might learn to work with and 
by the aid of historic facts, science in order to him- 
self be scientific by employing the methods of science, 
literature that he might make out its message and be 
his own critic and appraiser of that which is written, 
and ethics that he might make up his own mind 
about human conduct and guide his life accordingly. 
He must of course become self-supporting, but it is 
even more important that he become society-support- 
ing. These are indeed but two aspects of one and 
the same requirement. He must pull his own weight 
and must meet the standards of living, but he must 
also do his part in improving and raising the stand- 
ards of living. It is not enough that he be trained 
to fit into his environment. He must be trained to 
make it over into a better social environment. There 
is, in short, but one ideal of education. It is, 
and everywhere must be, the process by which each 
child of the race guided by his own interest, employ- 
ing his own attention, and using his own mind in 
comprehending the process of human living, becomes 
a person who thinks, desires and acts as the embodi- 
ment of social laws. 



THE CHILD IN MODERN SOCIETY ^ 

Stgmund Engel begins his book "The Elements 
of Child Protection" ^ with the statement: "In the 
struggle for existence among the nations, that nation 
is the victor which consists of the greatest number of 
individuals best endowed with bodily, mental and 
moral health. No national entity can resist the 
attacks of others if its numerical strength is com- 
paratively small." According to this view children 
must be protected in order that the state may be 
victorious. The place of the child in the modern 
societies which look at things this way is that of 
prospective cannon fodder. Our whole being cries 
out against such a doctrine. National existence is 
not the end but the means to the life of individuals. 
We do not exist that the United States may be. It 
exists that we may be. Men are not work animals 
owned by masters who have the power at will to 
send them to the slaughter. 

The great war which is now devastating the earth 
is a struggle between two radically opposed con- 
ceptions of life, between two irreconcilable philoso- 
phies. Their opposition is as old as Sparta and 
Athens. The one conceives man as belonging to the 
state, as its personal property with which its officers 

^ An address before the Council of Social Agencies, Los Angeles, 
Calif., June 29th, 1915. 

2 The Macmillan Co., N. Y., 1912. 

27 



28 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

may do what they please; the other conceives the 
state as belonging to the men who compose it as an 
instrument designed to minister to their needs, an 
organization to secure for all of us certain things 
which are indispensable to each of us which we can 
not secure for ourselves. 

The war is searching the hearts of all living folks, 
forcing them to decide what they believe men are 
for, what human life really is, what states may do 
with their citizens, and what citizens should do in 
states. There was a time when mothers gladly, 
with a profound sense of religious devotion, threw 
their infants into the fiery arms of Moloch. Moloch 
was an idol which men had made and set over them- 
selves. The state which is an entity above and 
superior to the totality of its population, which its 
people exist for and which does not exist for them, 
is an idol. It demands insatiably countless heca- 
tombs of living men who go to their death as gladly 
as chosen youths went to their death as human 
sacrifices to the old gods of Mexico, and as vainly. 
Let us abjure the worship of idols. They take a 
heavy toll of lives. It is true that they are no 
longer made of wood or stone. They are gods made 
by false thinking. Whenever men say that life is 
for anything else than life, whenever they declare 
that it is for the state, for conquest, for national 
glory, for art for art's sake, for knowledge for 
knowledge's sake, or for any other of the abstractions 
which men have in vanity made into gods and to 
which they attribute a greater reality than that 
which their own lives possess, they are indulging in 



THE CHILD IN MODERN SOCIETY 29 

idolatry, inhuman, debasing and destructive as any 
which the world has known. If a few of us are to 
be high priests of abstractions and are given power 
by our fellows to condemn the rest of men to give 
up their lives that we may worship the false gods 
whom we serve in whatever way we please, it were 
better that no more children were born. For unless 
life is a sacred and a holy thing, an end in itself, not 
in the service of anything but life, it is plain that 
non-existence is much to be preferred. Let us 
disavow the superiority of that which man creates 
to man its creator. Modern society does not exist to 
glorify states or to do the will of medievally minded 
kings. Children have a value to society quite 
apart from the fact they will grow into soldiers or 
will give birth to soldiers. The false philosophy of 
the state which has grown up in Germany with the 
hideous consequences which we see must be de- 
stroyed. The earth will not be a fit place for children 
to grow up in until it is eradicated. It is difficult 
to believe in the value of life in the midst of a world 
which values human life so little. How bitterly 
have we been imposed upon when we thought and 
talked about being civilized while men went about 
with this awful thing up their sleeves ! 

In this our land we run little risk of being deceived 
by a false philosophy of what the state is. We know 
very well that our institutions exist to serve us, not 
we to serve them. This does not mean that we shall 
not maintain them with our lives. We shall main- 
tain them because they serve us. But we shall not 
assume that they are inexpressibly precious in 



30 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

themselves no matter what they do, that they are 
God's appointed way for all men to live and that it 
is our sacred duty to offer every man who exists 
the choice between letting us regulate his life or 
taking up the sword. The thing that we exist for 
is the good life of each one of us. The child has no 
other reason for being than that he may have life 
and have it abundantly. Our problem is to guarantee 
it to him, to surround him with the influences which 
make for it and to keep away from him the agencies 
of destruction. 

What a strangely curious thing life is ! We come 
here without being consulted ; we are here for but a 
little time, and all our hopes and plans, all of the 
little work we try to do, all our anticipations and our 
fond desires to make of earth a better place and 
to improve the condition of men live on only in 
our children. If we could once realize the human 
pathos of our lot, if we could but feel our own 
dependence upon the young for living for us when we 
shall no more be here, I think we should be more 
solicitous for their well being. In a passage in the 
"Laws" Plato tells us that a man "must cling to the 
eternal life of the world by leaving behind him his 
children's children so that they may minister to God 
in his place" (773 E). By ministering to God he 
meant that the children should go on making straight 
what the parent had tried to make straight, ennobling 
what the parent had tried to ennoble, perfecting 
what he had tried to perfect and glorifying what he 
had sought to glorify. Theirs was to be a secular 
ministration, for Plato did not divide his world into 



THE CHILD IN MODERN SOCIETY 31 

things sacred and things profane. They are to carry 
on our work for us, to keep alive what we have 
undertaken. 

The child is born into this world of human pur- 
poses which he must carry forward. He is every- 
where about us, yet his existence is apt to escape us. 
Let us, if we can, image that innumerable company. 
The author of the "Invisible Playmate" rewords in 
this fashion the vision of the children which a quaint 
old German poet calls up under the title of the "First 
Day at School." 

All over the world — and all under it, too, when their time 
comes — the children are trooping to school. The great globe 
swings round out of the dark into the sun ; there is always morn- 
ing somewhere ; and forever in this shifting region of the morn- 
ing-light the good Altegans sees the little ones afoot — shining 
companies and groups, couples and bright solitary figures; for 
they all seem to have a soft heavenly light upon them. He 
sees them in country lanes and rustic villages ; on lonely moor- 
lands, where narrow brown foot tracks thread the expanse of 
green waste, and occasionally a hawk hovers overhead, or a 
mountain-ash hangs its scarlet berries above the huge fallen 
stones set up by the Druids in the days of old ; he sees them 
on the hillsides ["trails of little feet darkening the grass" he 
observes], in the woods, on the stepping-stones that cross the 
brook in the glen, along the sea cliffs and on the wet ribbed 
sands ; he sees them in the crowded streets of smoky cities, in 
small rocky islands, in places far inland where the sea is known 
only as a strange tradition. The morning-side of the planet is 
alive with them ; one hears pattering footsteps everywhere. 
And as the vast continents sweep "eastering out of the high 
shadow which reaches beyond the moon . . . and as new nations, 
with their cities and villages, their fields, woods, mountains and 
seashores, rise up to the morning-side, lo ! fresh troops and still 
fresh troops, and yet again fresh troops of * these small school- 



32 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

going people of the dawn/ each smallest lad as he crosses the 
home-threshold that morning is a Columbus steering to a new 
world, to a Golden Indies that truly lies — at last — beyond 
the sunset. He is a little Ulysses outward bound on a long 
voyage, where-through help him, thou dear Heaven, past the 
Calypso Isles and Harpy-shores lest he perish miserably.'* 

This school-going pageant daily follows the sun 
in his course. 

Now turn from this image to another. A friend of 
mine some time ago projected a history of education 
which unfortunately he has not completed. That 
history was to be upon a new plan. It was to be 
made up of different volumes, each one of which 
would trace the story of the particular aspect of 
school work which it treated from the earliest 
recorded beginnings to the present time. One vol- 
ume was to be devoted to the history of the school- 
house, another to the history of school administra- 
tion, another to the growth of courses of study, 
another to teachers, the last and to my mind the 
most fascinating was to be a history of school children 
in all the ages. What would I not give for such a 
priceless book, a volume which would enable us to 
see the generations as they started upon the course 
of life, to note the esteem in which their parents held 
them, to observe the care with which they nurtured 
them and the influences with which they surrounded 
them and the ideals which they formed for them. 
"The greatest reverence," says Juvenal, "is due to a 
child.'* If we had such a history of the children, it 
would indeed tell us how men regarded themselves, 
what visions of the future they loved to dwell on. 



THE CHILD IN MODERN SOCIETY 33 

and what deep significance life seemed to them to 
hold. For in planning for the welfare of the children 
men most consciously project their own deepest 
hopes and most intimately reveal their own souls. 
When we deliberate about them we are attempting 
to shape the very structure of to-morrow, to select 
the samples of lives which we most want shall be, 
and in this conscious effort to create the kind of men 
and women who shall come after us and profit by 
our mistakes as well as our successes it is given us 
to make the nearest approach to the divine creative- 
ness which frail mortals are allowed to make. 

What then do we want for the children.'^ First 
of all that they shall be well born — not fated by 
their parents to a life of physical and mental 
defectiveness. Idiocy, alcoholism and syphilis must 
not be allowed to reproduce themselves. "The 
device for humanity must be," says Engel, "not 
natural selection, but artificial selection — eu- 
genics ! " We did not require the war to show us that 
we are in but a beginning stage of civilization. Any 
one who has noted the care with which men breed 
animals and plants and the want of care which they 
show in the breeding of children, must have arrived 
at the conclusion that they either value the plants 
and animals and do not value their children or that 
their intelligence is so weak and feeble that they do 
not recognize the fact that the principles of breeding 
which apply to the plants and the animals apply to 
the children also. The eugenists must simplify 
their program; when they reduce it to manageable 
terms we shall all unite with them to put it into 
p 



34 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

effect. At present they defeat their cause and our 
cause too by claiming a larger knowledge than 
they really possess and by not devoting themselves 
single mindedly to the enacting of legislation which 
would bring about the segregation or if need be the 
asexualization of all individuals who belong to the 
classes whose children are certain to be blighted by 
their heredity. What is wanted first is enlighten- 
ment, but that enlightenment must lead to coercion. 
Shall society revert to the ancient practice of 
examining all who are born and picking out those 
children who are not fit to live and putting them to 
death? "When such children for one reason or 
another, find their way into the world, they should 
be quickly and painlessly destroyed," writes Engel. 
Such children, he thinks, are high-grade cretins, 
idiots and the grossly deformed. They can never 
become useful members of society and to-day the 
refinements of medical skill preserve them to a life 
of martyrdom. It must be confessed that they are 
a serious social problem and it is not clear just how 
that problem should be solved. But the helpless 
are by no means socially useless because they are 
not producers and can never handle a rifle. They 
call for care and are opportunities for kindliness on 
the part of the sound and the strong. If might 
makes right, since they do not possess might they 
should go under. But fortunately this is not the 
working theory of most nations; those who still 
believe that it is the peace-makers who are blessed, 
not the war-makers, the merciful, not the merciless, 
the poor in spirit, not the arrogant, the meek and 



THE CHILD IN MODERN SOCIETY 35 

not the proud, will have a care against breaking into 
the bloody house of life and understanding a law. 
If we wish men to value life we shall not soon take 
such liberties with it. 

Society does not want to propagate defectives 
and must do all in its power to prevent their multi- 
plication. But is a high birth rate of normal children 
our object.'^ Is mere fertility of the stock a good, 
and increase of the population a national virtue .^^ 
Here again if the end of life is the creation of a vic- 
torious army on the part of the nation to which we 
belong, since size of the army is one element of success 
in battle we must answer yes, a high birth rate is 
necessary in order that we may have plenty of 
soldiers and "realize our national aspirations." 
But if we are more interested that the state shall 
have a population of good quality rather than num- 
bers merely, our answer must be no. An excessive 
number of births will mean a deterioration in the 
quality of the stock and our national aspirations 
toward a higher grade of existence, greater individual 
perfection, a better social order, cleaner, sweeter, 
happier lives and a progressive realization of justice 
will be thwarted. It must be apparent to every 
American that the ends to which we are devoted are 
not served by a high birth rate but rather by the 
quality of the life which we are able to secure for 
our children. 

The quality of their life is in large part determined 
by social heredity — by the kind of homes they 
grow up in — by the nurture which attends them in 
the earliest years. Which are the most important 



36 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

years in the child's welfare ? The unanimous answer 
of all the great thinkers, Plato, Aristotle, Quintilian 
and those of the modern day, is that the early years 
are most decisive. "The beginning is the most im- 
portant period in the case of a young and tender 
nature which readily takes the stamp which may 
be impressed upon it." The psychoanalysis of the 
Freud school would have us understand that a child 
who grows up in a home in which mother and father 
are continually quarreling can not have a normal 
temperament or a happy life. He is bound to suffer 
the penalties of emotional wear and tear. His teeth 
are literally on edge and his nerves in a jangle. It 
makes a very great difference to him through- 
out his entire life what kind of an atmosphere sur- 
rounded him in his infancy. One can hardly make 
too much of this point. Plato seems to have been 
quite right in insisting that the breezes of beauty and 
health should blow over the souls of the children, 
that the poets should create the image of the noble 
character or make no poetry among us, that the other 
craftsmen should put a stop to embodying the charac- 
ter which is ill-disposed, intemperate, illiberal and 
improper in their pictures, their buildings or the 
other products of their craftsmanship on pain of 
being debarred from working among us if they do 
not, for the young must not be nurtured upon images 
of badness which little by little feed them until they 
gather a huge evil in their souls. The graceful and 
the beautiful must be their surroundings, bringing 
them unconsciously both to likeness and to friendship 
with the law of beauty. 



THE CHILD IN MODERN SOCIETY 37 

Some years ago Maurice Hewlett wrote an article 
which appeared in the "Nineteenth Century and 
After," in which he suggested that as England already 
had a bureau of standards where the standard inch, 
foot, yard, pound, gallon and bushel are kept, where 
reference to them may be made to correct the false- 
ness and inaccuracy of the measures of commerce, she 
should also institute a bureau of social standards. 
Let a fine child be chosen, he said, and kept at 
Westminster and whenever bills are introduced in 
Parliament let those who propose them be required to 
take them to the fine child at Westminster and weigh 
them against him. If he falls in the scale, let the 
measure be rejected. If he rises, let it be approved. 
If we weighed social conditions in terms of the fine 
child, much that is proposed would have to be rejected 
and much that exists would have to be repaired. 
Yet he is the social standard. Our whole duty can 
be summed up in the effort to make of this world a 
fit place for him to live in. Take this standard 
into any city or into any country place and by its 
aid you will soon find conditions which cry aloud 
for remedy. There are the tenements without pure 
air and sunlight. He can not grow in them. There 
are foul unsanitary surroundings. He can not exist 
in them. There is unspeakable disorder, hideous 
ugliness, a decaying countryside, a city district which 
is a dump heap. What kind of breezes blow over the 
souls of the children from these places? 

Worse, far worse than the menace of physical 
surroundings utterly uncared for and run down, is the 
disorder and despair of the persons who are his 



38 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

model, who give him the only suggestions which come 
to him and standardize his conduct and his taste. If 
one allows himself to think of this world, for a 
moment, simply as a place for children to grow up 
in, his heart sinks at its blighting unfitness and 
the lack of vigorous effort on the part of all of 
us who are alive to make it fit for them. The time 
will come when conditions will be arranged to pro- 
mote their welfare, when Plato's prophetic dream 
of an environment of pleasant places ordered and 
beautified to safeguard the souls of the young will 
come true. There is no gainsaying that children 
suffer much from their elders, from the despairing 
surroundings in which they are brought up, from 
the penury and want of hovel and garret, and from 
the brutish ignorance and filthiness of mind which not 
infrequently attend them. One may not be able to 
agree with Jean Jacques, that they are born good 
and everywhere become bad because society makes 
them so, but he will at least admit that they are 
born to take the stamp of the influences that play 
upon them and that these influences are not in- 
frequently harmful. 

Quintilian complains of "a blind and indolent 
negligence on the part of parents." It happens far 
too often that the parent is the natural enemy of 
the child. In state institutions there are groups of 
children whose parents have not taken pains to 
housebreak them at the time when that lesson should 
be taught. As a result they grow up almost like 
pariahs in conditions which no normal child should be 
allowed to continue to make for himself. Society, 



THE CHILD IN MODERN SOCIETY 39 

as a whole, is not without its responsibiHty for the lot 
of the child, but parents are the specially deputed 
guardians of the children. Their task is a heavy one 
and one which they almost always are frank to con- 
fess seems to them too difficult for accomplishment. 
Every mother would at times send her child to the 
state institution if she could do it as easily as her 
neighbor who has taken a child for adoption sends 
him back when he has proven himself to be unworthy, 
says a friend who is herself a mother. The business 
of rearing a child, even of rearing the best of children, 
is a hard one, a responsibility which those who have 
it recognize themselves as unequal to cope with. 
Being a parent is a human job concerning which 
much knowledge has accumulated. There seems to 
be no very good reason why parents should not be 
trained for their task just as experts in any line are 
trained. This training should come after they have 
children rather than before, for it is only when the 
child puts in his appearance that one really begins 
to know about children. Every city should have a 
school for mothers in session throughout the year. 
It could be under the direction either of the board 
of education or of the board of health, since the 
instruction should be the same in either case and par- 
take of the functions of both bodies. Attendance, 
say for one hour a week, might well be compulsory 
for six months after the first child is a month old. 
Having provided for the instruction of the mother 
it is now our duty to talk about the instruction of 
the child. His physical well-being is of the first 
importance. Health and strength are things we 



40 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

must be helped in our early years to get for ourselves. 
How many boys and girls of your generation and 
mine suffered untold horrors from toothache and go 
through life marred and maimed because their parents 
had no care to help them to preserve their teeth at a 
time when they were too young to do it themselves ? 
In New York City recently there was a tooth brush 
drill in Central Park in which hundreds of public 
school children took part, whose sole object was to 
impress the need for the care of their teeth upon them. 
This is a good illustration of the stress which modern 
society is beginning to put upon these matters. 
How many children have been sent to an early grave 
after a brief life made miserable by tuberculosis 
simply because they were not given breathing lessons 
and taught to use their lungs properly ? Again how 
many have suffered from eyestrain, from earache, 
from adenoids, and how many have been allowed 
to indulge in play or work which gave them defective 
hearts to suffer from as long as they lived? The 
health of the child determines the health of the adult 
to such an extent that modern society finds that it 
must bend its energies to constructive efforts in 
this direction. 

Modern society feels that the education of the 
children is its supreme constructive activity. Its 
laws forbidding child labor, requiring attendance at 
school, training and carefully supervising teachers, 
setting apart funds for the erection of elaborate 
school buildings, providing an elementary education 
and after it high school or trade instruction for all, 
are some of the evidences of its solicitude that each 



THE CHILD IN MODERN SOCIETY 41 

child may be guaranteed his right to instruction. 
This has been called the century of the child and 
until the declaration of war a year ago it seemed to 
be rightly named. It bids fair now to go down in 
history as the century of disaster. At any rate it is 
clear that nothing will prevent the destruction of 
civilization and the complete extinction of progress 
but such a world-wide rectification of human inten- 
tions as only a completer devotion to education can 
bring about. We are, I think, upon the eve of the 
greatest educational revival that the world has yet 
seen. It will be an education, however, which is 
not primarily materialistic. It will have for its prime 
purpose the culture of human ideals. 

I have not spoken of the great system of agencies 
by which society seeks to redeem the socially unfit 
and to restore them to social fitness. It is not that 
I have forgotten them that I overlook them, but 
because I regard them all as remedial, as purely 
custodial for those who are defective at birth, or 
existing to undo the ill results which defective homes, 
defective schools, and a social life which is careless 
and indifferent to its own welfare produce. The 
agencies which exist to do repair work can not com- 
pare in importance with the agencies which exist 
to make such repair work unnecessary. It is upon 
the constructive forces of society that our attention 
must be fixed. If one could bring it to pass that the 
homes and the schools and public opinion itself 
should do their duty, there would be little need for 
juvenile courts, reform schools and prisons in the 
land. 



"IS THE STRESS WHICH IS NOW BEING 
PUT UPON THE PRACTICAL INTER- 
FERING WITH THE IDEALISTIC 
TRAINING OF OUR BOYS AND 
GIRLS?" 1 

A RECENT report of the United States Com- 
missioner of Education contains the statement that 

the vocationalizing of education remains the dominant note of 
the year. It will probably continue to be of paramount impor- 
tance for many years, since the vocational movement in its larger 
aspects bears such vital relation to the whole problem of widen- 
ing democracy. 

There can be no question that this movement is on. 
It has two forms, one the movement for definite 
vocational or trade or occupational training, the 
other a much larger movement to make education 
of all sorts definitely and specifically preparatory for 
the life that the student will lead by making that life 
the basis of his education throughout. Any one 
who reads the most interesting educational paper 
which comes to my table — the Educational Supple- 
ment of the London Times — will not be long in 
discovering that this current of educational change 
is running far more rapidly in England just now than 
it is in America. That education must be modern- 
ized by being made so practical that it will fit men 

^ An address before the Religious Education Association, Boston, 
February 28, 1917. 

42 



"THE PRACTICAL AND THE IDEALISTIC* 43 

and women to cope with the everyday affairs of 
Ufe is as definite a conviction over there as that 
England must win the war. If our nation becomes 
involved in the war, it will come out of it with many 
times more interest in practical education than it 
now has. In short the world seems to have entered 
upon an educational renaissance far more important 
and more widereaching than any educational revival 
through which it has yet passed. We live at one 
of those great times when old things are rapidly 
passing away and all things are being made new. 

I am asked to consider the question whether or 
not this insurging of practicalizing education may not 
interfere with the idealistic training of the young. 
My answer is unqualifiedly no. On the contrary it 
is certain to do for us what education has by no 
means done in the past, it is certain to make idealism 
abound. In one of their conversations Goethe warns 
Eckermann that to attempt to realize the ideal is 
vain and futile, for not that but to idealize the real 
is our problem. Now this whole vocationalizing 
effort has no other purpose than to help folks to 
idealize the real. I used to be a teacher in a mission- 
ary school for the children of ex-slaves in the midst of 
the black belt in the south. Ours was a school with 
a strong preference for the classical type of studies ; 
there were newer studies there, but they were not 
received gladly. We taught book work of the pre- 
vailing kind, great quantities of reading, writing and 
spelling without any particular effort to see to it that 
our students read what they should have read, or 
wrote what they should have written or spelled the 



44 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

words they should have spelled. In short we taught 
reading for the sake of reading, writing for the sake 
of writing and spelling for the sake of spelling without 
for a moment doubting that these abstract and un- 
related activities would somehow make themselves 
into tools and get themselves used by the poor little 
befuddled, deceived, and pompous graduates of our 
school. And after we had taught them reading and 
its fellow studies without teaching them how to use 
them we gave them copious instruction in English 
grammar which they could not understand, United 
States history which was so abstract and unrelated to 
anything they had seen or had any part in, that most 
of it was meaningless to them, and the hardihood 
of the few who were not utterly discouraged by this 
course of study we next tried to break by setting 
them to wrestle with the Latin grammar. Two or 
three who had persevered in that course as far as 
Cicero's orations we felt had not had enough grammar 
yet, so we set them to memorizing the Greek grammar. 
The money to provide that education was collected 
dollar by dollar, ten-cent piece by ten-cent piece, and 
almost penny by penny from hard-working, pious 
folks whose hearts bled for the suffering poor, and who, 
as they listened with rapt attention to the persuasive 
missionary's account of how education was being 
brought to an oppressed race, taxed themselves 
heavily, shared their living and frequently gave more 
than they could afford, that those poor colored 
children might have the unutterable blessing of an 
education; and we teachers used that money and 
took years of the time of those young people and 



"THE PRACTICAL AND THE IDEALISTIC" 45 

sent them out into the world knowing nothing, able 
to teach chemical definitions and formulas to others, 
but wholly unable to use chemistry in farming, able 
to classify flowers but not to grow crops, able to pass a 
verbal examination on a book on physics but quite 
unskilled in working with machines. Some of them 
left with ideals such as that they should be clean, 
should not steal, should be men and women of their 
word, should work hard and be honest, but these 
ideals did not come from what they studied. They 
came from association with devoted people — 
devoted even though they were teaching the wrong 
studies and teaching them in the worst of ways. 
We had transplanted New England education into 
the south. It did not fit there, and though the re- 
sources and the energy of the best teachers that the 
society could assemble were behind it, it was a failure, 
and because it gave those young people a false 
knowledge and false notions of their own importance 
as possessors of a knowledge which they did not 
have it was harmful to them. 

A few miles away in another state a colored teacher 
who knew his people and their needs far better than 
we did, with an intuition amounting to genius, dis- 
cerned a truth that we must all in time discern and 
created a school to teach colored men and women to 
work. He taught them useful trades and forms of 
handiwork, and as essential parts of these skilled 
industries he taught them how to use their ability to 
read, to write and spell and employ calculation. He 
set before them the ideal of service. Learning, he 
said, which does not help you to produce something 



46 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

which men want, to act and live in such a way that 
men seeing your good works will value and honor 
you, is empty learning. You are to be citizens in a 
great free cooperative country. Your first duty is 
to learn to do your part and if you do that, all other 
things will be added unto you. That educational 
reformer, as everybody knows, was Booker Wash- 
ington (may his name be praised). He lived to 
transform the education of the colored race. In place 
of an abstract and formal schooling he gave them a 
genuine training for the work they are to do. In 
place of an abstract and conventional morality and 
religion he taught them a concrete morality and 
religion. In place of unrelated ideas he gave them 
purposes and taught them to use ideas in attaining 
them. In place of offering them ideals from books 
and the aspirations of other men he taught them to 
develop their own ideals and to aspire themselves. 
Emerson warns us to look out when God looses a 
thinker in this world. The work which this humble 
educational thinker did is bound to transform almost 
everything which schools and teachers do. It 
showed conclusively that the New England type of 
education must give way to a better kind of education 
in the south. It is now showing that the New Eng- 
land type of education must give way to a better 
kind in New England and in the whole United States. 
There are few happenings in the history of men more 
unexpected and astonishing than that the colored 
race within a single generation after it was freed 
from slavery should have taught the white race how 
to train up its children. A critic of education had to 



*'THE PRACTICAL AND THE IDEALISTIC*' 47 

grow up outside the treadmill of education in order 
to put the proper value upon what is being done and 
to point out ways of doing better. The most striking 
experience I have yet had in this incarnation was to 
meet and talk with the Buddhist monk Dharmapala 
and to hear from his own lips that he had come to 
America in order to take back to India a man suffi- 
ciently familiar with the work of Booker Washington 
to establish a school similar to that of Tuskegee in 
the ancient city of Benares. That school was started. 
Surely nothing more dramatic has anywhere hap- 
pened than that the best and most saintly represent- 
ative of the oldest of all civilizations should seek the 
help of the best of the last of all the races to become 
civilized, in the education of his people. 

My own difficulty is not at all due to concern lest 
the young may lack an idealistic training if they are 
instructed in practical studies and given what is called 
a vocational education. My difficulty is that I can 
not comprehend how any other kind of education 
ever came to be given. How did it happen that 
anything but that which prepares men for their work 
ever came to be regarded as education ? Must not 
all education be vocational .^^ If we follow Aris- 
totle's advice to study things in their origin, we get 
great illumination upon this problem. Paleolithic 
man, if he taught his child anything, must have 
taught him to do the things which he had found 
indispensable, to chip stone implements and to hunt 
with their aid. Whatever education there was in 
that early time was clearly vocational. And voca- 
tional it remained at Sparta, and at Athens too, for 



48 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

reading and music and gymnastics were the means to 
that democratic citizenship which the abihty to read 
Solon's laws, to understand the Homeric morality 
and to defend the state against the Persians made 
possible. When the Sophists introduced higher 
education into Greece they came offering to teach 
the art of life or how to succeed in public and private 
affairs. One of them, Gorgias, believed and taught 
that but one thing was needful. The person who 
wanted to be a physician he urged to learn how to 
make speeches rather than to study medicine, and 
the man who wanted to become a general he said 
should study speech-making rather than military 
tactics. But Socrates corrected that error and spent 
his life in telling the Athenians that they must learn 
civic and manly virtue in just the same way that they 
learned to make shoes or pilot ships. Plato in a 
famous passage [Laws 643-4] tells us what his notion 
of education was. 

No better statement of what education is has ever 
been made than his. It is learning beforehand the 
knowledge which one will require for his art. The 
teachers should direct the children's inclinations and 
interests to their final aim in life, and of all these 
aims that of being a good citizen and a good man is 
the greatest. That, too, according to Plato, is an 
art in which one is to gain skill in distinguishing 
good from evil, true from false, noble from ignoble by 
what he does, just as the carpenter learns his trade 
or the farmer his. Cleanthes tells us that Socrates 
"cursed as impious him who first separated the just 
from the useful." That knowledge is virtue was the 



-THE PRACTICAL AND THE IDEALISTIC" 49 

one doctrine that he taught. To him all knowledge 
was practical, and as I read him all knowledge 
was practical to Plato also. It was Aristotle who 
introduced confusion, first, by distinguishing a 
liberal education from an education fit for slaves, a 
distinction which the world mistakenly tries to 
maintain after slavery has gone out of existence, 
and, secondly, by separating theoretical knowledge 
from practical knowledge — theoretical knowledge, 
as he put it, being knowing just for the sake of know- 
ing, knowing wholly unmixed with volition, and 
practical knowledge knowing for the sake of doing. 
Is there any such thing as knowing unmixed with 
volition ? At any rate the lecture notes of Aristotle's 
instruction show us that he gave great attention to 
practical knowledge. Roman education was prac- 
tical throughout, and education in the dark ages and 
the lesser renaissance, and the greater renaissance 
was throughout a specific preparation for what those 
who studied intended to do. Reformation education 
was intensely practical, specifically preparatory for 
the chief work of man. When the learning of the 
past had been translated into everyday speech it 
seemed to a good many thinkers of that day that 
the study of Greek and Latin should be given up and 
that the real things about men should be studied 
instead of the languages. The realists had the best 
of the argument, until about 1750 certain German 
teachers of the old subjects began to defend their 
retention in the schools by declaring that though 
Latin and Greek are no longer practical, since what 
we study in them is no longer useful, they must be 



50 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

pursued because they develop the powers or faculties 
of the mind. Thus the doctrine of formal or general 
education came into being and for a long time wholly 
supplanted specific education, which was the only kind 
of education which had existed for two thousand years. 
The man who objects to the onrushing present-day 
movement to make education specific throughout 
and definitely preparatory to the work of life does 
so for one, or perhaps more than one, of three reasons. 
He either follows Aristotle as against Socrates and 
Plato and declares that knowledge exists for the 
sake of knowledge, science for the sake of science and 
learning for the sake of learning, or he holds to the 
doctrine of formal discipline and believes that there 
are some studies which improve the mind and perfect 
its powers and which are therefore indispensable 
while we are getting an education, though we can 
not after we leave school use them. Or he fears 
that making education definitely practical will result 
in such a narrowing of the course of study which each 
student pursues that nothing but one-sided training 
will result and therefore prefers the old confused, 
aimless and unjustifiable education solely because he 
believes it requires the student to study more different 
subjects than the proposed arrangement will require. 
There is a fourth reason which some men give for 
their preference for the old studies. It is that they 
give the student hard work and lots of it, but this 
justification of them overlooks the fact that the new 
studies provide plenty of work too, and have the 
advantage of permitting the student to understand 
why he does it. 



"THE PRACTICAL AND THE IDEALISTIC" 51 

The person who objects to practical studies be- 
cause he beheves in knowledge for its own sake is an 
intellectualist and must reckon with the pragmatists. 
His philosophy of learning seems to be unsound. 
There is no warrant in psychology or in history for 
such a position, and the phrases he uses seem to have 
no meaning. Literature, science, philosophy are all 
things which man has created. It is idolatry for 
the creator to worship the things which he has made. 
They are all tools or instruments which the young 
must learn to use and work with, but not ends in 
themselves. It is as sensible to say that hammers 
exist for the sake of hammers as to say that literature 
exists for the sake of literature, mathematics for the 
sake of mathematics and science for the sake of 
science. They all exist for man's sake and for no 
other reason. There is a very great advantage in 
giving up spelling for the sake of spelling, geography 
for the sake of geography and literature for the sake of 
literature. Just as soon as we take the view that we 
learn to spell in order that we may spell the words 
which we shall need to spell when we write, our task 
becomes so definite and manageable that we can 
accomplish it, while so long as we learn to spell 
words just because words are spelled, there are so 
many of them which are spelled that we do not 
learn to spell them with any degree of success. The 
same limiting and defining of our task takes place 
in all the other subjects. 

The man who believes that the business of edu- 
cation is to perfect or at least improve the faculties 
of the mind will have to reckon with the psycholo- 



52 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

gists, who declare with one accord that there are no 
faculties of the mind. He will have to make his 
peace with such men as Professor Spearman, who 
declares that "the great assumption upon which 
education has rested for so many centuries is now at 
last rendered amenable to experimental corrobora- 
tion — and it proves to be false!" The more he 
studies this intricate subject the more convinced he 
will become that a philosophy of education can not 
be made out of the doctrine of formal discipline, that 
all education is definitely and thoroughly specific. We 
can not longer take the years of children in order to 
train them in accordance with a theory which has been 
proved to be unsound. All life is a doing and all real 
education is learning to do certain things which neither 
the student nor his fellows can get along without. 

If any person thinks that specific or practical 
education can not be of as many kinds as are neces- 
sary to prepare the student to do all the several sorts 
of acts which he as a moral person, good citizen, 
member of a family, social and industrial producer, 
and trustful child of God must do he must have 
reckoned but indifferently with the dictum of the 
psychologist that "it is impossible to keep up an 
interest unless it be specific," and that the specific 
interests which unite us to our fellows may each and 
all of them be fostered and trained in the school. 
The fact which we must reckon with is that general 
education of the faculty-developing sort does not 
foster but depresses them. One of my colleagues, 
whose interest in the mental life of students is 
exceptionally acute, tells me that he is convinced 



"THE PRACTICAL AND THE IDEALISTIC" 53 

that our present requirement that certain studies 
must be pursued for reasons which the student can 
not comprehend (nor can we ourselves, for that 
matter), and which the student spends his years 
upon in an aimless fashion, leaves him mentally 
disorganized and ambitionless at the end of his 
course. His idealism is gone, he distrusts his own 
powers and he faces the world in a dejected and 
despairing condition. The school and college, in- 
stead of fitting him to take part in the battle of life, 
have unfitted him to do that. The conclusion is 
clear : studies must take the life form. Knowledge 
for the sake of knowledge, which is an empty claim, 
must be given up. Education must be vocationalized 
throughout and students must be given opportunity 
to acquire the knowledge which they will require 
for their art. That art is broad but not vague. 
If it prepares them for it all education becomes real 
and vocational, for the life of the religious person, 
of the citizen in a democracy, of the member of a 
family and a social economic producer is the life 
unto which they are called. 

I have a quarrel with the folks who are trying to 
give the good old word vocation the exclusive 
connotation of a money-earning occupation. One is 
called to many more things than to produce goods 
for sale. His education at all stages must, I think, be 
broader than a mere effort to acquire saleable skill, 
though at certain stages the development of saleable 
skill in a particular trade or occupation should be the 
chief element in his course, but not even then the 
only element. 



54 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

We may take it for granted that the man who has 
not learned to do anything has not found and is not 
finding his place in society. He is not able to give 
himself a value in the social equation. His spirit 
must be that of the non-contributing member, of the 
outsider, the wanderer, the vagabond. You can not 
make a society out of such men, neither can you 
socialize them. To teach the young that each one 
of them has a place and a work to do and that his 
main business in youth is to find out what that work 
is and to fit himself most diligently to do it seems to 
me to be the whole purpose of education. Unless 
every part of it is going to make a difference in our 
after lives we had better omit it. The food-pro- 
ducing or life-maintaining occupation is the core of 
our activity ; it is only a part of our activity — but 
it is and should be the organizing part. An edu- 
cation built upon the vocational motive broadly 
enough construed to enable the young person to 
acquire the elements of his entire work in life would, 
I think, be far more truly cultural than the formal 
education to which we misapply that adjective. 

And I am going to claim for it that it will develop 
a more genuine sense of religion too. After all, it is 
working with the resisting material of life that brings 
us face to face with the great fact of God's existence 
and of the human law of justice and the great need 
for faith and loving-kindness. Religion is just choos- 
ing the kind of a universe that we are forced to insist 
that this must be. Books may help us to decide 
what kind of a universe we must think this is, but 
the lives that we live tell us far more about that than 



"THE PRACTICAL AND THE IDEALISTIC" 55 

even the best of books do. The man whose life is 
one untroubled joy may read his Bible, but its words 
must seem like an ancient tale to him. If his will 
throughout has its own way, he will not come to a 
realizing sense that he is a child of higher powers. 
He will worship himself and be his own disciple. 
Phrase it as we will it is chiefly this self -worship that 
keeps men away from God. Whenever they are 
caught up in the struggle of mighty forces which will 
not obey them, but which they must take note of 
and obey, they become humbled and dependent. 
It is adversity rather than prosperity that purges 
the mind. In times of great public calamity alone 
do men see the glory of the coming of the Lord, for 
then only do they become genuinely other-minded, 
feeling their own helplessness and their complete 
dependence upon a power which is not themselves. 
Why do we all choose justice then rather than life 
and the way of sacrifice rather than peace without 
effort ? Because we feel it is the will of God. 

Now the education which introduces us early to 
the realities with which men have struggled ever 
since the world began is far more certain than the 
education which comes from books to make us 
aware of ourselves and the forces with which we 
must reckon. He who reads a book about agri- 
culture will learn something about the recurring 
seasons and may gather from it that they are a 
beneficent arrangement to enable men to live, but 
he who tills a field will know the recurring seasons 
as a fact which he must reckon with or starve. He 
who studies physics for the culture of his mind will 



56 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

learn something about the law of gravitation, but he 
who builds a wall or constructs a house will have a 
realizing sense of it. It is what we do that teaches 
us. It is easy to get on with one's fellows in the 
school, but in the shop team work and the ignominy 
of shirking are realities. Our little undertakings, if 
they be real, teach us the importance of the virtues. 
Our great undertakings in which we stand together 
facing defeat and death teach us perhaps for the 
first time in our lives that all that we can do is of 
but slight avail, that unless right is on our side and 
God fight for us our struggle is in vain. It is pur- 
pose, laying hold of life in race-old human ways, 
rather than indifferent and aimless seeings and hear- 
ings, that we must depend upon to make men really 
conscious of the facts and significance of religion and 
morals. For a purposeful wrestling with conditions 
has a sobering poignancy about it as superior to a 
mere verbal taking account of them as first-hand 
evidence is superior to hearsay evidence. It is in 
sweeping rooms, in herding sheep, in plowing fields, 
in driving engines, in tending machines, in fighting 
battles, that one must learn to be a child of God, or 
his religion will be as little a workaday affair as his 
Sunday clothes are. 



WHY WE GET ON SO SLOWLY 

It was in a large city. We came by invitation of 
our host, who all his life has been singularly devoted 
to making this world a better place for folks to live 
in. His fellow stockholders have elected him to the 
directorate of one of the largest corporations in which 
he owns stock. I mean the public schools ; he is an 
active not merely a voting director. My friend, the 
director of studies, and I were the first to arrive. 
'*Tell us what it is all about," we said, as soon as we 
had exchanged greetings. "It came to pass in this 

way," he said. " My friend G was, as you know, 

president of the board of education for some years. 
Three years ago he retired from that body. I used 
to tell him that our most important duty was to 
make over the course of study. But we were so 
busy about vocational schools and parents' com- 
plaints and other small matters that we never got to 
that, though I have long believed that since it is 
the program of work which both teachers and stu- 
dents are required to follow and the rope which ties 
the feet of every one of us, it is the thing of things 

to look out for and keep in order. G never saw 

it that way when he was president of the board; 
but now he has a daughter in one of the schools, and 
what she is forced to do there is more than he can 
bear. The number of roods in an acre and of fur- 

57 



58 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

longs in a mile seems to have been the straw which 
broke his self-control. He says it is stuff, and no 
child should be required to learn it. He came to me 
a week ago and asked me to bring together a half 
dozen men to do something about it. That's why 
you're here. He is bringing a business man, Mr. 

Z , with him, and I have asked two members of 

the state board of education and the superintendent 
of schools to come in." 

In a little while the company gathered, and our 
host turned to the ex-president of the board of 
education and asked him to tell us how it looked 
"to a former school officer who had been converted 
from his official indifference by being a parent with 
his own child in school." He spoke with marked 
seriousness. "The great problem of life," he said, 
"is not death; the great problem is children. 
Nature sees to it that at the last we die peacefully, 
but as long as we live our children are a source of 
unceasing anxiety to us. First the baby is not 
strong, and we go about with the horrible feeling 
in the back of our minds that in spite of all we can 
do, he may die. When he is safely over that, we be- 
gin to wonder what sort of stuff is in him, and set out 
to teach him to be clean and mannerly, to show spunk 
by not crying, and not to pull the house down, or 
set fire to it, or run in front of automobiles. If he 
goes to a neighbor's to play with her children and 
brings something back which does not belong to 
him, we inquire how he got it. He says it was 
given to him. Like all mortals his desire to accumu- 
late is very strong, and we wonder if what he says is 



WHY WE GET ON SO SLOWLY 59 

so. We take him by the hand and lead him into 
the neighbor's presence. Alas, there is no future for 
us if he goes on in this way. Our beloved child 
whom we have cared for so tenderly is a thief! 
Horrid word ! Our confidence is gone. The honor 
and good name which we have striven to build up all 
these years are now threatened. Why does he insist 
on taking so lightly that which is the very object 
of our existence.'^ We forget for the moment that 
he is not set up to distinguish mine and thine when 
he comes here. They are not ideas that he is born 
with. Like every one who ever lived, he must learn 
to think them for himself. We reason with him, we 
talk about the important things to him. Alas, 
the same is true of everything. Why does he sound 
words so imperfectly .f^ Why does he make such 
queer errors in speaking? He begins to count, and 
I give him little sums to add or to subtract. Two 
and six, I say. Four he answers. Two from six; 
eight he instantly replies. Why does he have such 
strange notions of things? If there were but some 
way of saying magic words over him, or if he might 
sink into a Rip Van Winkle sleep and waken from 
it a man, I should be satisfied, if he were only the 
kind of a man I want him to be. 

"We look forward eagerly to the child's going to 
school. Then, we say, the major part of our troubles 
will be over. He shall have the expert care of wise 
and loving teachers. They will set his feet in the 
way he should go. In them we shall have coadjutors 
of the spirit who will supply wisdom for our lack of it 
and will mightily supplement our fumbling efforts 



60 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

by the sureness of their intelHgence. His first days 
in the kindergarten are a heavenly deHght. The 
things he brings home which he himself has made 
are positively wonderful. His joy in his school 
knows no bounds. When he goes to the first grade, 
almost the same thing is true. I do not know just 
where the trouble begins, but somewhere in the 
second or third grade unmistakable shadows of the 
evening begin to steal over his spirit. He no longer 
runs to school with his former alacrity, he is not the 
same buoyant self when he comes home at night, he 
no longer speaks of his teacher with his old-time 
enthusiasm, and he frequently complains, *I can not 
get my lessons, I don't know what this old arith- 
metic is about.' My little girl is farther on than 
that. She is required to learn how many roods 
make an acre, and how many cubic inches a gallon. 
She is worrying over bank discount, longitude and 
time, compound proportion, aliquot parts, and 
cube root. The problems she brings home make 
her parents shiver. They are like this : Divide 
639i^ by M. If the principal is $567, the time 11 
months and 13 days, and the amount $763, what is 
the rate.^ What is the cube root of 1,797,643? 
Find 14f % of 25 acres. 

"These are, to be sure, extreme instances. But 
what has she to do with extreme instances ? There 
is another thing that I object to. Wlien she studied 
addition, the sums she was required to add were 
composed of numbers of six and seven figures more 
often than not. You would have concluded from 
the size of the computations which she practiced 



WHY WE GET ON SO SLOWLY 61 

upon that her teachers were confident she would 
become a milHonaire and henceforth have nothing 
to do with calculations that involved less than a 
hundred thousand dollars. Yet I find that she 
cannot multiply 8 by 7, nor subtract 9 from 13, 
nor divide 64 by 9. Ordinary everyday work she 
simply does not have a chance to do, and such prob- 
lems as meet one in the street, in the shop, and the 
home are neglected in order that puzzles may be 
solved and absurdly grandiose computations made." 

"You are repeating an ancient objection," said the 
superintendent. 

**But I have not done yet," said the ex-president 
of the board of education, who had been promoted 
to the role of a parent, "indeed I have hardly begun. 
OfiFense against common sense in arithmetic is nothing 
to what it is in grammar. I lie awake at night and 
weep over what my daughter is required to study in 
that subject. It is the most metaphysical and un- 
certain of all the creations of the human intellect. 
The world reached its highest known stage of 
intelligence before grammar was even invented, 
much less studied. I have had some curiosity to 
find out where and how so great a blight upon young 
life first came into being and why it ever became a 
school study, and I find that the Greeks knew it not, 
that their triumphant literature and their matchless 
oratory came to flower before grammar was dreamed 
of. That it was not in any sense one of the great 
arts which they wrought out and with which they 
armed the human race. That after Greece had 
declined, a barbarous Macedonian made himself the 



m WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

owner of all Egypt, and in order to surround himself 
with the most spectacular form of ostentation of 
which his vain mind could conceive, he set to collect- 
ing not only all the rare and precious objects and 
books and manuscripts there were in the world, but he 
capped it all by making a collection of the living men 
of the world who had any reputation anywhere for 
knowing and thinking ; taking them from their homes 
where they had some relation to the daily necessities 
of human beings, and had really been of some use, 
he shut them up for life in one of his palaces at 
Alexandria, which the folks there were in the habit 
of calling * the hencoop of the muses' ; and out of 
sheer desperation, since they could do nothing better 
to amuse themselves, they counted the words in the 
books which real men had written, and prepared 
tables of the forms and endings which the users of 
words employed. The lifeless dregs of books which 
their distilling left we now call grammar, and study 
instead of books and even speech itself. In their 
lowest depth of indifference to the moving, pulsing life 
of man not even the Alexandrians sank so low as that. 
"Pardon my vehemence, but it is wicked when our 
children ask us for bread to give them this stone. 
To make them study grammar seems to me like 
feeding them on the wrapping-paper in which our 
food is brought from the grocery. Is our language 
merely a thing to be known about or a thing to be 
known? I would be foolish to try to learn to play 
golf by committing a book about it. You say our 
children should speak correctly. Are we trying to 
make them into precisians? Without giving them 



WHY WE GET ON SO SLOWLY 63 

rich opportunities to make mistakes and teaching 
them that utterance and being understood are the 
great things, are we going to make them into wor- 
shipers of words, who, having been told that they 
are stern things, are henceforth so afraid of them that 
they wrap their thoughts in a napkin of f earsomeness 
and refrain from uttering them? 

"But this is not the worst of it. They study defi- 
nitions which are not in the slightest degree com- 
prehensible to them. I am a lawyer, as you know, 
and have spent my life in learning to make subtle 
distinctions, but the distinctions of the English 
grammar which my child is required to learn to 
make in her lessons are beyond my power. I have 
asked her to find out from her teacher if she under- 
stands what they are in certain cases, and I find that 
the teacher is no better off with them than we. But 
the chief objection that I have to it is that the most 
that one learns when he studies English grammar is 
not true." 

"Yes," said our host, "I know what you mean. 
I was three years in the law school, and I spent two 
of them in learning what a contract is, namely, 
what is an offer and what is an acceptance. That is 
a simple distinction compared to the metaphysical 
problems with which children in the elementary 
schools are expected to wrestle successfully when 
they study English grammar." 

"If you want," said I, "an instance of the essential 
diflBculty of grammar, take nouns. We are taught 
that nouns are names, but that does not help much, 
for every word, every part of speech, is a name." 



64 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

"I was taught," said Mr. X , "that a noun is 

the name of an object." 

"It is not that," said I. 

"Truth, for example," said the superintendent. 

"Truth," said I, "is not an object, it is a class 
or kind. Is it a quality or aspect of things or a 
quality or aspect of our relation to things?" 

"I think," said our host, "that we should hear 

from Mr. R what is being done at present to 

determine how successfully the children are working 
in the schools, and to improve their work." 

"We have been giving a series of standard tests 
for some years now to the children in our schools," 

said R . "First, we tested their skill in adding, 

subtracting, multiplying, and dividing numbers, 
and by repeating these tests, not only has their skill 
improved, but we have been able to determine 
about how many sums of a given degree of difficulty 
children can add to advantage in say eight minutes. 
Thus we have tried to find the proper limit of speed 
which is compatible with accuracy. If they attempt 
to do more in that time, accuracy is sacrificed to 
speed ; if less, both speed and accuracy seem to fall 
off. In this way we are trying to determine what we 
may reasonably expect to accomplish and what 
therefore should be required in our course of study 
in the four fundamental operations of arithmetic. 
We shall next attempt to make the same sort of tests 
in regard to the teaching of fractions and interest 
and the other applications of these four fundamental 
operations. 

"We have made similar studies to provide lists 



WHY WE GET ON SO SLOWLY 65 

of words which the children should learn to spell. 
Professor Jones in a western university, some time 
ago, with the cooperation of teachers in all parts of 
the United States, procured 10,000 compositions 
written by school children on subjects of their own 
choosing, and carefully tabulated the words which 
they used in them. He found that they had em- 
ployed some 2100 different words in all, and he 
believes that this total of words may be taken as 
representing the aggregate writing vocabulary of the 
American elementary-school child. Of course, it is 
not the vocabulary of any one child, and different 
children have diflficulty in spelling different words in 
it. This list was sent out to the schools, and a series 
of trials was made to find out which of these words 
our children could spell and which they could not, 
and therefore needed to study. The results were 
carefully tabulated and lists were formed and re- 
duced to lessons which were printed on detached 
sheets at the expense of the school department, 
which lists are now being used as our textbook in 
spelling." 

"Would it not be better for us to try to find out 
what words folks have occasion to write when they 
leave school?" was the question of one of the com- 
pany. 

"We have now begun to try to find out, in the 
same way, what our lessons in geography should be. 
In conjunction with experts in that subject, we 
prepared a list of ten typical questions on the geog- 
raphy of the United States and seven on the geog- 
raphy of Europe. This list of questions was given 



66 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

as an examination to advanced classes in several 
representative elementary schools, the total number 
of elementary-school pupils who attempted to answer 
the questions being 594. It was also given to 165 
third-year high-school pupils and to a class of first- 
year students in the normal school. One question 
required the students to locate New York and San 
Francisco upon an outlme map of the United States 
which was printed upon the paper. Another ques- 
tion was : Why are the flood plains in the central 
part of the United States well adapted to agriculture ? 
In marking the answers the greatest leniency was 
shown; for example, if New York City was located 
anywhere within the limits of New York State, the 
answer was given full credit. But by most of the 
pupils it was not so located; it was put anywhere 
along the coast or in the interior, the fact that it is 
a seaport being quite forgotten by many of them. 
No one answered the second question correctly, 
though flood plain is a term which is fully explained 
and is treated at considerable length in the geog- 
raphy which they have been studying. Eight and 
seven-tenths per cent of the 594 elementary-school 
pupils passed the test on the geography of the United 
States; four and eight-tenths per cent of the high- 
school students, and one out of the whole number of 
86 normal-school students passed it. No one passed 
in the geography of Europe." 

"How many facts does a student of geography find 
recounted in his lessons in that subject for a single 
year, do you suppose?" asked the superintendent. 
*' Would you say as many as ten thousand.^" 



WHY WE GET ON SO SLOWLY 67 

"I should say fully as many as that," replied Mr. 

R . "Our effort is to simplify and organize the 

lessons we require the children to learn. They are 
completely confused by the great mass of material 
which we are in the habit of putting before them. 
They do not know what they are expected to do, nor 
why they should give attention to this rather than 
to that. Neither do we seem to. The result is 
awful. We must find the irreducible minimum 
which a school child should attempt to work within 
each of these different subjects, and we must fix our 
attention upon that. There is no other way to 
bring order out of this chaos." 

It was the superintendent's turn to speak next. 
**A teacher," he said, "has recently come to us from 
one of the countries to the south of the Rio Grande, 
and she has been preparing to take our examination 
for a license in the subject of arithmetic. She says, 
*You employ so many queer terms and such strange 
tables in your arithmetic that I am in doubt whether 
I shall be able to master it. In the other parts of 
America we use the metric system, and it is as easy 
to learn to compute by it as it is to learn to spell.' 
Then I saw quite clearly with what an unjust burden 
of nearly insuperable difficulty, through our crude 
method of pronouncing English words as they are 
not spelled and spelling them as they are not pro- 
nounced, we handicap every English-speaking child. 
Much the same is true of arithmetic. Is there any 
real reason for our clinging so tenaciously to an 
antiquated and illogical system of weights and 
measures when nearly every other nation has 



68 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

adopted a simpler one? We are creatures of habit, 
and visit our sins upon our children. 

"You have been saying bitter things about 
grammar, but you have not said haK enough. It 
begins with a definition which runs something like 
this : * Grammar is the science which treats of the 
principles of language, and the art of using them.' I 
frequently go into schoolrooms and find the children 
studying it. I ask them to tell me what grammar 
is and they repeat the definition which they have 
memorized. Then I say, * Since you have been 
studying the principles of language for some time, will 
any of you tell me one principle which you have 
learned?' I have never yet succeeded in getting 
one. Then I turn to the teacher and ask, * WTiat 
principles of language have you been studying with 
them ? ' The teacher is no more able to answer than 
are the pupils. I ask them what grammar tells 
them about, and they reply, * About the parts of 
speech and the kinds of sentences.' I ask then, 
*WTiat are the parts of speech?' They name them 
beginning with the noun. Then I ask them what 
part of speech I am. They answer you are a noun, 
and some say, 'No, a pronoun.' I strike the desk 
with my hand and ask what part of speech that is. 
* A verb,' they say. Sometimes I get correct answers 
from eighth-grade children, but rarely from children 
below that grade. The distinctions which we seek to 
have them make are beyond their comprehension at 
that early age. There is little profit in trying to 
force children to make them. We teach them a kind 
of rigmarole which they learn and go through with 



WHY WE GET ON SO SLOWLY 69 

some success when they parse a word or diagram a 
sentence ; but as for principles of speech, they might 
just as well be playing checkers. 

"This same honoring of definitions above things 
goes on in geography. Of course, it goes on else- 
where too, indeed it goes on in every study. Did 
you ever stop to think what a fiendish enemy of the 
human race words have been ever since men began 
to use them ? First, the savage was unable to dis- 
tinguish the name of the thing from its essence, and 
made the man-destroying mistake of assuming that 
he could control things and make them do what he 
wanted them to do if he called upon their names. 
There you have the whole story of magic rites, in- 
cantations, and talismans in a nutshell. But think 
how it all lay like an ocean, through which men 
could not make their way, across the path of human 
progress. At last in one little corner of earth, in 
Attica, men got themselves free from magic words 
and set about the task of trying to find out what they 
must do to live as they wanted to live. They in- 
vented sciences which to them were nothing but 
carefully worked out investigations as to what men 
should do and what views they should hold about 
highly important human matters. Then come the 
idol-makers again, and personify and hypostatize 
these tools which man has made to help him in his 
work; and being unable to look away once more 
from what are now magic names to the thoughts of 
which they are the names, they go the savage, not 
one, but a whole dozen better by creating a priesthood 
not to manipulate things by means of words, but in 



70 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

ever singing choirs to celebrate the praises of words, 
and to teach the young of every country meaning- 
less catechisms of words, to words, and for words. 
"Have you ever heard the statement that 'edu- 
cation is linguistic'? Well, it is, and more's the 
pity. Would that the Greeks might come again and 
free it once more from that curse. There is not a 
single corner of the vast undertaking where words 
and phrases are not cultivated to the detriment of 
thought. I went into a schoolroom where children 
were engaged in writing the sentence *An island is a 
body of land entirely surrounded by water' over and 
over again a great many times in their notebooks. 
Their writing was good too. The teacher asked me 
what I thought of it, and I said it was good; but 
*I don't like your sentence,' I said. *The trouble 
with it is that it is not true. An island may be of 
stone or of lava or of coral ; it is not always of land, 
and it need not be surrounded by water, it may be 
surrounded by oil or by ice or by molten lava. 
What you say of an island does not distinguish it 
from a continent ! ' Those children were repeating 
words, not studying geography. So convinced am 
I of this that I do not allow the facts of geography 
to be studied in the same year with the definitions. 
Let the facts come first and the definitions wait. 
If we know the facts in this instance and that and the 
other, we shall in time of course forget most of the 
instances, but we shall have built up a core of under- 
standing of that which is common to each kind among 
them, which will remain. If we start with instances, 
we shall build up our knowledge; but if we start 



WHY WE GET ON SO SLOWLY 71 

with verbiage, we shall never, at least in most 
eases, get beyond verbiage, and verbiage is soul- 
destroying. 

"I believe that the time to study English grammar 
is when a person begins another language that has a 
grammar. Then he is constantly required to look 
back to his own language, and ask how it handles 
this same matter. Grammar is possible as a com- 
parative study ; it is meaningless until then." 

"Do you not think it is a great advantage then for 
students to study Latin ?" some one asked. 

"I do not know," he said. "I was in a high- 
school classroom a little time ago where the class 
was engaged in translating Caesar. 'At the setting 
of the sun,' one young lady was saying, 'at the setting 
of the sun, many wounds having been given and 
received, Caesar withdrew from battle.' 'I have 
never heard young women in conversation say "at 
the setting of the sun,"' I remarked. 'How do we 
say that?' 'We say "at sunset,"' one young 
woman suggested. '"Many wounds having been 
given and received." How do we express that?' 
No one volunteered to offer a phrase, so I proposed 
* after a severe skirmish' or 'after a bloody engage- 
ment.' 'Now how does it read?' But the teacher 
objected that the college examiners would never 
accept such a rendering in a college entrance exami- 
nation paper, and the school must prepare its students 
to enter college. 'Suppose you write to them and 
ask them if they would not,' I suggested. She did 
so, and some weeks afterward I was notified that 
the college authorities preferred a literal translation. 



72 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

Translation English is very different from the mother 
tongue. 

"I have never been quite able to understand why 
the study of Latin is good mental training," said our 
host. "But I believe that it is because it seems to 
bring that result. The only reason why it does so 
that I can think of, apart from the fact that it 
sticks out a very distant point in the world and 
thereby gives a very wide base for the imagination to 
work upon, is that the mental process which it re- 
quires is the same as that required in every practical 
undertaking Making out a Latin sentence requires 
the student to hold in mind a dozen different prob- 
lems, each with several possible solutions, and then 
to find one hypothesis which will satisfy them all. 
This is true of the beginners in Latin for whom each 
word may mean one of two, three, or a half-dozen 
different things. Compared with that the process 
which is a straightaway matter of learning is so 
much more simple that it is not in the same class 
at all." 

"That is my view of it also," said Mr. X . 

**We must not forget that the main business of 
education is to help pupils to acquire the art of 
thinking well about everything. There are some 
studies that do that. Latin is one of them. Greek 
is another. Mathematics is another. Young people 
must be trained to exactness. These studies are 
mighty good for that. Caesar was always a great 
delight to me. I recall his account of the con- 
struction of the bridge with pleasure to this day, 
though it was many years ago that I read it. I think 



WHY WE GET ON SO SLOWLY 73 

we must not let ourselves become too narrowly 
utilitarian." 

"Shall I sick you on them?" said the superinten- 
dent to me, for he knew that the doctrine of formal 
discipline was my pet abhorrence. 

"No," 1 said, "what is the use.? Mr. X and 

our host here cannot be converted from the error of 
their ways. They are now going back on all they 
said earlier in the evening, but what of that ? They 
can not let a little matter like the right kind of 
education for all the children of this city, this state, 
and our country shake their confidence in the finality 
of the educational theory which supports the teaching 
of Latin. Studies are good, they think, not because 
we use them, but because they have magic powers." 

"Did you ever stop," said the superintendent, 
"to think that the folks who tell us that by studying 
one thing we learn another ought to prove their case ? 
The burden of proof is on them since they make the 
assertion. Yet their claim never has been proved. 
Many of the best thinkers of the world have opposed 
it as Plato did when he said, * I have hardly ever 
known a mathematician who could reason ' ; as 
Quintilian did when he refused to accept the view 
that geometry is valuable to us while we study it 
but not in after life ; and as John Locke did when he 
said that he wished those who claimed that the 
memory could be improved spoke with as much 
authority of reason as they did with forwardness of 
assurance. It is said that all wars are wars about 
doctrine. It is certain that all education is the out- 
growth of doctrine. The doctrine which is behind 



74 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

much of that which we do in elementary schools, 
high schools, and colleges is not sound doctrine. 

"I said a moment ago that those who maintain 
that if we want to do one thing we must train 
ourselves to do another, have not proved their case. 
That is not because of an oversight on their part 
but because they cannot prove it. It has already 
been disproved. They say that they train the facul- 
ties of the mind. They do nothing of the sort, for 
psychologists have taught for a hundred years that 
the mind is not made up of faculties. We have 
memories, not memory ; imaginings, not imagination ; 
observings, not observation; reasonings, not the 
reason; and ten thousand acts of will, not a single 
faculty which men used to call the will. WTiy then do 
educators try to do what psychologists tell them 
cannot be done? In spite of all the psychologists 
tell them, they still believe that in some way they 
can train the memory, the imagination, the observa- 
tion, the thinking power, and the will as a whole. 
They can not. 'The great assumption upon which 
education has rested for so many centuries,' as 
Professor Spearman says, *is now at last rendered 
amenable to experimental corroboration — and it 
proves to be false!' The ancient idol has been 
demolished by painstaking research. The doctrine 
of formal discipline must go the way of outworn 
superstitions. We must set ourselves to the task 
of working out a new program of studies which 
shall train our students to think the thoughts and 
do the things which folks who live as we want to live 
must think and do." 



^WHY WE GET ON SO SLOWLY 75 

*'Why call it a new program," I said, "or think 
that you have made a discovery in education? I 
think that the notion that education is just learning 
to do the things that one will have to keep on doing 
as long as he lives is the oldest notion, as well as the 
truest, which men have held about it." 



THE DOCTRINE OF GENERAL DISCIPLINE ^ 

It has been said that "the problem of mental dis- 
cipline, of determining under what conditions, by 
what methods, and to what extent training received 
in a given line of mental activity spreads to other 
lines of mental activity is acknowledged to be the 
central problem of educational psychology." ^ It is 
more than that, it is the central problem of educa- 
tional philosophy as well, and the attitude which 
we who teach take upon this problem determines 
as nothing else does what we put into courses of 
study and how we teach that which we attempt to 
teach. Until we can get our bearings on this sub- 
ject we simply can not get our educational bear- 
ings at all. 

The doctrine of formal or general education is a 
heritage from the past ; it is a theory concerning the 
value of studies which has a history, but not by any 
means so long or so compelling a history as we are 
sometimes told that it has. When palseolithic man 
invented stone implements, he doubtless taught his 
children how to make and use them; when his 
descendants invented the bow and arrow, they taught 
their children how to shoot with them. Whatever 

^ An address before the New England Association of Colleges and 
Secondary Schools Nov. 11, 1916. 

2 TVTiipple in the preface to Rugg's The Experimental Determination 
of Mental Discipline in School Studies. 

76 



DOCTRINE OF GENERAL DISCIPLINE 77 

training they gave was specific, and all education was 
frankly and clearly specific until the Sophists came 
and taught that if one wanted to be a physician he 
should study rhetoric, or if he wanted to be a general 
he should learn to make speeches. They brought in 
confusion ; but Socrates cleared it up by perpetually 
insisting that one must learn "human and public 
virtue" or excellence, in the same way that he learned 
to build houses or make shoes. This, too, was the view 
of Plato, throughout whose works insistence that 
education is specific is as marked as it was in the 
discussions of Socrates. But in the Republic Plato 
uses a sentence or two about the study of arithmetic 
and geometry stirring the mind to greater keenness, 
which led some men who read his dialogues to say that 
when we study arithmetic and geometry, we do not 
merely learn to think arithmetically or geometrically, 
but we improve our minds throughout. Plato takes 
pains to show that that is not his meaning, for in the 
same connection he says that students must go on 
from mathematics to dialectic, for "I have hardly 
ever known a mathematician who could reason." ^ 
There is no evidence whatever that Aristotle believed 
in anything but specific education. The next men- 
tion we have of the doctrine is in Quintilian, where 
it is stated only to be dismissed. This is the passage : 
"As to Geometry, people admit that some attention 
to it is of advantage in tender years, for they allow 
that the thinking powers are excited and the intellect 
sharpened by it and that a quickness of perception is 
thence produced ; but they fancy that it is not like 

1 Republic 531. 



78 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

other sciences, profitable after it has been acquired, 
but only whilst it is being studied." ^ Then Quintilian 
goes on to point out that it is to be studied for certain 
specific kinds of profit after it has been acquired. 

As nearly as I can discover, everything which was 
taught during the dark ages, the lesser renaissance, 
the greater renaissance and the period of the German 
reformation was taught and studied under the con- 
viction that it was specifically useful. The contrary 
doctrine that studies are to be pursued, not for their 
specific values but because they improve the mind, 
has sometimes been wished upon John Locke. And 
there are some passages in his writings which seem 
to justify that interpretation, but there is one passage 
in which he clearly and definitely repudiates it. 
"I hear it said that children should be employed in 
getting things by heart to exercise and improve their 
memories. I could wish this were said with as much 
authority of reason as with forwardness of assurance 
and that this practice were established upon good 
observation more than old custom. For it is evident 
that strength of memory is owing to a happy con- 
stitution and not to any habitual improvement got 
by exercise." ^ 

Some years ago at Yale University one of my 
students. Dr. S. L. Eby, took for the subject of his 
doctor's thesis a study of educational practice in 
Germany in the 18th century. That thesis has not 
been published, but is on file in the Yale library. In it 
he shows quite conclusively that in Germany about 
the middle of the 18th century the teachers of the 

1 Institutes Bk. 1-34. ^ Thoughts on Education, 176. 



DOCTRINE OF GENERAL DISCIPLINE 79 

classics began first in one place then in another, and 
finally pretty generally, to defend their teaching of 
Latin and Greek against the attacks which the realists 
were making upon them by saying that the study of 
the classics does more than give a knowledge of the 
classics, that they discipline, improve and perfect 
the mental faculties of the students who pursue 
them. Thus twenty-three hundred years after Plato 
made his chance remark about the study of arith- 
metic and geometry making the mind of the student 
keener, which he took pains to explain does not mean 
that a mathematician can think, this view of the 
function of studies which was not anywhere accepted 
by teachers or students until the earlier reasons for 
studying the classics had lost their force, became the 
operative philosophy of education throughout the 
west. The beginnings of faculty education syn- 
chronize with the development of faculty psychology. 
As long as psychologists taught that the truest view 
of the mind was that it was made up of faculties, 
the observation, the imagination, the memory, the 
reason, the emotions, and the will, it was inevitable 
that schoolmasters should devote themselves to 
developing and perfecting these faculties. But the 
faculty psychology was destroyed by the critical 
studies of Herbart nearly 100 years ago, yet perhaps 
as many as 80 per cent of the teachers of to-day and 
very nearly 100 per cent of present day parents still 
hold to the theory of faculty training as firmly as though 
the faculty psychology had not been abandoned. 

There seem to have been critics of this educational 
doctrine ever since it was first introduced, but they 



80 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

were not able to make any headway against its on- 
rushing for one hundred and fifty years. In the 
latter part of the 19th century the opposition to 
it became so powerful that the cruder claim of 
educators to train the memory, the observation, the 
imagination, the reason and the will as faculties has 
now been abandoned in their writings. 

Cardinal Newman challenged the doctrine when 
he wrote of having known men "who could without 
effort run through the succession of days on which 
Easter fell for years back ; or could say where they 
were or what they were doing on a given day in a 
given year; or could recollect the Christian names 
of friends and strangers ; or could enumerate in exact 
order the names of all the shops from Hyde Park 
Corner to the Bank; or had so mastered the Uni- 
versity Calendar as to be able to bear an examination 
in the academical history of any M.A. taken at ran- 
dom, and I believe in most of these cases the talent, 
in its exceptional character, did not extend beyond 
several classes of subjects. There are a hundred 
memories as there are a hundred virtues." 

There are numerous pathological cases in which 
the patient has lost the memory of things heard, 
because of a lesion affecting the brain center which 
controls hearing, but has not lost the memory of 
things seen or touched or tasted or smelled, and other 
cases in which he has lost the memory of things seen 
but not the memory of things heard, etc. In 1890 
Professor James undertook by experiment to deter- 
mine the influence of training in memorizing one 
kind of verse upon efficiency in memorizing other 



DOCTRINE OF GENERAL DISCIPLINE 81 

kinds of verse. He first committed 158 lines of 
Victor Hugo's "Satyr." It took some part of eight 
days and a total time of 13 If minutes. He then 
trained his memory by working twenty minutes 
a day in committing "Paradise Lost" and finally 
committed the first book. After this training he 
went back to Victor Hugo's "Satyr" and found that 
to commit 158 additional lines, the same number as 
before, took 20 minutes longer than before the train- 
ing. Four of his students repeated the test. Two 
of them showed considerable gain after practice, 
two none at all. Professor James stated it as his 
conviction that the native retentiveness which we 
bring with us at birth can not be changed. 

Since that first laboratory study a whole literature 
of experiments on the doctrine of formal discipline 
has come into being. Prior to 1900 three experi- 
mental studies were published, but in Rugg's recent 
book ^ the results of some thirty experimental in- 
vestigations are reviewed and tabulated, thus show- 
ing that the experimental study of this problem is of 
quite recent date. 

Before we take up the consideration of these 
experiments let us ask what they were undertaken 
to prove. They were not undertaken to find out 
whether or not the memory, the observation, the 
imagination, the reason, the emotions and the will 
can be trained as faculties or powers in a wholesale 
fashion, for nothing more was needed to show that 
these "powers of the mind" can not be trained as 

^ The Experimental Determination of Mental Discipline in School 
Studies, Warwick and York, Baltimore. 



82 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

powers than to call attention to the fact that no 
such powers exist. 

In some respects it would have been fortunate for 
education if the whole matter had been left there, for 
if attention had been devoted to rooting out the 
pernicious doctrine that the faculties of the mind 
can be trained simply by pointing out that no such 
faculties exist, educational practice would be meas- 
urably better to-day than it is. 

t If the memory can not be trained or developed as 
a memory, if the observation or the imagination or 
the reason or the will can not be trained as a faculty 
or power, then the doctrine of general education must 
forthwith be given up, for it is the doctrine that they 
can be so trained. When the doctrine of general 
education is given up, as it must be, only specific 
education remains. 

The question which has been so diligently in- 
vestigated in recent years is not at all the question 
whether the "powers of the mind" can be trained. 
No investigator even thinks it worth while to con- 
sider so absurd a proposal. The question which is 
being investigated is to what extent that which is 
learned in one context is and can be applied in an- 
other context. In many respects this is purely a 
psychological question and of no great interest to 
educational practitioners. If it were not for the 
fact that loose thinking has confused two issues in 
such a way as to bring about a general belief that the 
doctrine of faculty training has been supported by 
investigations which are not at all concerned with 
faculties or the training of faculties, teachers would 



DOCTRINE OF GENERAL DISCIPLINE 83 

have paid little or no attention to the meager and un- 
satisfactory results which psychological investigators 
report concerning the spread of training from one 
undertaking to another. For this unfortunate result 
we must blame the logical confusion of these psy- 
chological investigators themselves. 

" We note, " writes Professor Dewey in his ** Democ- 
racy and Education," "that the distinction between 
special and general education has nothing to do with 
the transferability of function or power. In the 
literal sense any transfer is miraculous and impossible. 
But some activities are broad; they involve a co- 
ordination of many factors." Training in these 
acts is specific, but they have many applications 
and are called for in many different situations. 
Hence a specific activity like a method of going to 
work to solve problems or to memorize verses may 
be applied in many different contexts and have a 
broad utility. No one thinks for a moment that we 
shall ever be called upon after we leave school to use 
the methods which we acquired in school, on material 
exactly like that in connection with which we 
learned them. The arithmetical problems a boy 
will solve in life are different from those he solves in 
school ; and the political questions a student meets 
in the world are not exactly the same as those he 
studies in the class in government. But they are 
recognizably similar, else he could not possibly use 
his school learning to react to them. No two situa- 
tions in which we find ourselves are ever alike and 
yet we make over our past experience to meet new 
situations if they are not so completely novel as to 



84 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

confuse us. The mind is a generalizer. It is con- 
stantly engaged in stretching past experience to fit 
new needs. Everybody must, I think, admit that. 
Now the question which is being experimentally 
determined in laboratories is : within what limits 
does this process of generalizing take place, or within 
what Hmits can specific learning be used ? But very 
unfortunately the nomenclature which is employed 
in discussing this new problem is the nomenclature of 
formal or general discipline. 

Taking these experiments for what they really 
are as efforts to determine within what limits proc- 
esses are generalized let us ask what they show. 
"Does training transfer? Under conditions of 
training studied in these thirty investigations we can 
answer unequivocally," says Rugg, that "there is 
distinct evidence for the so-called transference of 
training. The experimental training of the abilities 
of either adults or school children in either laboratory 
or schoolroom will result in an increased efficiency 
on the part of the subjects, in other abilities which 
are in some way related to the trained abilities. . . . 
'Transfer' is an accepted fact, but as to the extent 
to which training transfers and the most favorable 
conditions for its transfer, specialists are not always 
agreed . . . The investigators may be grouped into 
two schools : (1) those who believe that the effect 
of training is quite specific and who oppose the view 
that transfer can be possible through any form of 
'generalization.' (2) Those who believe that the 
effect of practice can be generalized. Numerically 
the latter are much the stronger." 



DOCTRINE OF GENERAL DISCIPLINE 85 

Of the nineteen investigators who consider the 
question how transfer of training is possible — 
eleven of the thirty do not consider this question — 
fifteen declare that it is possible through certain 
factors of generalization. The experiments show 
that it is due to devising methods of learning. Dr. 
Rugg quotes one writer's explanation as significant. 
*'Our instruments do not improve; we only learn to 
use them better. Those who do not learn to use 
their instruments . . . from practice show little 
or no transfer of improvement through practice." 
"The experiments," Dr. Rugg continues, "show that 
we must distinguish between the ideational possi- 
bilities of transferred improvement and the vain hope 
of the 'spreading' function of rigidly developed sen- 
sory, perceptual and motor adjustments. These 
latter have to be taken over into new situations un- 
changed, and can operate with increased efficiency 
only as the conscious utilization of them in combina- 
tion has been made more effective through experience. 
Thus the studies indicate that the law of learning has 
to be made a conscious matter of ideation in order to 
insure any considerable amount of transferred im- 
provement. The largest improvement seems to 
come when the subject discovers that certain methods 
are helpful." 

These results seem then to confirm Professor 
James' conclusion completely: "When boys im- 
prove by practice in ease of learning by heart, the 
improvement will, I am sure, be always found to re- 
side in the mode of study of the particular piece (due 
to the greater interest, the greater suggestiveness. 



86 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

the generic similarity with other pieces, the more 
sustained attention, etc.) and not at all to any 
enhancement of the brute retentive power." 

Methods of study and of work then can be taught 
in such a way that they will be helpful in many 
different situations. We can learn to use our in- 
struments better and better, but our innate powers 
can not be changed. 

The most thoroughgoing and critical study of this 
entire subject, I think, is to be found not in the work 
of American investigators, but in Dr. Sleight's recent 
book, "Educational Values and Methods." ^ Pro- 
fessor Spearman, the distinguished director of the 
psychological laboratory of the University of London, 
who has hitherto been classed among the believers 
in at least a qualified formal discipline, declares in 
the preface which he writes to that book that "the 
great assumption upon which education has rested 
for so many centuries is now at last rendered ame- 
nable to experimental corroboration — and it proves 
to be false ! To the demolition of the ancient idol 
no one has contributed more powerfully than Dr. 
Sleight; his . . . experiments, involving very great 
labor for many years, were characterized by a 
perfection of technique that extorted admiration 
even from those investigators whose previous meth- 
ods and results he was showing to be faulty. . . . 
The conquests of science are not made by storm, 
but by slow sap. . . . His main principle in- 
deed is fixed in the bedrock of accurate psycholog- 
ical experiment. . . . WHien it becomes advisable 

» Oxford, 1915. 



DOCTRINE OF GENERAL DISCIPLINE 87 

that old branches of instruction should give way to 
new, how shall this be demonstrated to those for 
whom the old branches mean livelihood ? Can they 
be expected to stand so far above all other classes of 
humanity, that they will connive at their own exe- 
cution? We must anticipate, rather, all the bitter 
and desperate struggle that invariably accompanies 
grave menace to vested interests." 

I can not do better than to ask you to read that 
book. I am satisfied that it is indeed an epoch- 
making work. But let me tell you very briefly what 
it is about. Dr. Sleight examines earlier experi- 
ments critically and finds them faulty and incon- 
clusive in certain respects. He undertakes a series 
of experiments more carefully worked out than any 
of the earlier ones. A series of ten memory tests 
was followed by twelve half -hour periods of practice, 
four periods in each week, then ten more memory 
tests were given, followed again by twelve more 
periods of training and these again by a third series 
of tests. The experiment was carried on with 
children of an average age of twelve years and eight 
months in three different schools. 

The ten tests were : 

1. The exact placing from memory of dots within 
circles after several views of a large cardboard copy. 

2. The memorizing of dates. 

3. Nonsense syllables. 

4. Verse. 

5. Prose extracts. 

6. The recall of the substance of a prose extract. 

7. Geographical positions, two or three at a time. 



88 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

were shown once upon a wall map and the children 
were then required to place them from memory in 
an outline map of the world. 

8. Dictation of continuous prose in portions of 
increasing length (from eight to nineteen words). 

9. Letters dictated from four to eight at a time. 

10. Christian names and surnames dictated to- 
gether in twos, threes and fours. The surname was 
then given and the children were required to write 
down the Christian name belonging to it. 

In each school the tests were given in a different 
order. After the first test series had been given the 
children in each school were arranged into four groups. 

1st. A group which took all the tests but none of 
the practice training. 

2d. A group which practiced with verse. 

3d. A group which practiced tables. 

4th. A group which practiced the reproduction 
of the substance of prose extracts. 

The children in these groups were of approximately 
equal ability. They were grouped in this fashion 
to find out if practice training of one kind had more 
influence upon doing the work of the tests than train- 
ing of another kind. 

Every precaution was used to do careful and exact 
work. What were the results? 

1st, as was to be expected, there was a general 
improvement in all the tests on the part of all who 
took them. 

2nd, there was no general improvement of 
trained over untrained. There was no sign of any 
"formal discipline" such as Meuman believed that 



DOCTRINE OF GENERAL DISCIPLINE 89 

his experiments showed, but of which Professor Dear- 
born could find no evidence when he repeated Meu- 
man's tests. The pupils who took only the tests 
became more proficient in the ten items of the tests 
and the pupils who were trained in particular ways 
became more proficient in the matter upon which they 
were trained, but there was no heightened proficiency 
in the nine- tenths inVhich they were not trained. Dr. 
Sleight concludes that "there is nothing therefore to 
warrant the assumption of a general memory develop- 
ment." The effect of the training throughout was 
specific. Practice in reproducing prose led to greater 
skill in reproducing prose, but not in memorizing verse 
or nonsense syllables. Practice in memorizing tables 
did not have any effect in date memorizing. Train- 
ing in verse and tables helped materially in memoriz- 
ing nonsense syllables because of the use of rhythm in 
all three operations, but practice in prose substance 
left nonsense syllables unaided. 

After this elaborate study was made with children, 
a similar investigation was carried out with two 
classes of training college women students from 
eighteen to nineteen years of age with almost iden- 
tical results. Again there was general improvement 
in the second test series, but again there was no 
general superiority of trained over untrained. Dr. 
Sleight states as his conclusion therefore (1) "That 
specific memory training is specific in its effects ; 
there is no general memory function which can be 
developed by feeding it upon any one material. 
(2) Psychical factors, such as attention and imagery, 
are not capable of general development merely by 



90 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

means of one-sided training. Attention to arithmetic 
is an activity which may increase without having 
any influence whatever upon the power to give 
attention to good manners or to the names of streets. 
Acts of attention are . . . rather distinct and 
separate acts, differing from one another according 
to the stimuli which set and keep them going." 
(3) In cases where improvement was brought about 
in one exercise by practice in another, a computation 
shows that direct practice was worth on the average 
144 times as much as indirect. 

We have heard a great deal about the transference 
of training in recent months. Dr. Sleight shows by 
these figures that no one should study one thing in 
order to learn another unless he has 144 times as 
much leisure and energy to devote to the indirect 
practice as he needs for the direct. There is no 
warrant for the belief that wherever common ele- 
ments exist between one operation and another, the 
effects of training will be transferred; on the con- 
trary, the most that can be said, is that wherever 
training is transferred, common elements exist. 
Spread of training is very rare and so uncertain and 
slight as to afford no justification whatever for the 
study of one subject in order to learn another. We 
can not say that learning to think out arithmetical 
problems will help us to think out geographical 
problems or political problems. We can not even 
say that learning to solve the arithmetic problems 
of the book will help us to solve those of the market 
unless our study of arithmetic in school has been of 
so broad and concrete and practical a kind that we 



DOCTRINE OF GENERAL DISCIPLINE 91 

will inevitably recognize the applicability of what 
we learned in school to the problems that now face 
us and demand solution. There must not only be a 
common element in the practice work and the life 
work, it must be a usable common element. The 
only way to make it usable is to make the student 
keenly aware of its connections with the very matters 
upon which he is to use it. 

Thus the only education we can possibly believe 
in is specific education. We must be taught to 
think the thoughts and work with the things which 
we shall have to work with as long as we live. 
Just those things must be studied and not subjects 
which are said to be valuable only while we study 
them, but not after we leave school. We must 
regard education as concretely preparatory, "and 
every lesson we want our students to learn we must 
teach them, and in so far as we can, we must teach 
it with reference to the very matters upon which 
they will have occasion to use it. 

The war is showing us how perversely specialized 
the mental processes of peoples, even the best edu- 
cated ones, are. Our minds seem to react by prefer- 
ence only to that with which they are familiar and 
to that only in familiar ways. Inventions would 
not be so rare if we could readily apply the principles 
of work with which we are familiar to new situations 
with which we are not familiar. 

The fundamental fallacy of the theory of formal 
or general discipline, as Professor Dewey has said, is 
its insistence that activities and processes can be 
acquired apart from the subject matter upon which 



92 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

they are to be used ; but our acts are always specific. 
We talk about the memory or the reason, but that is 
only a name for remembering this or remembering 
that or thinking about this or thinking about that. 
The acts are many. The name we have for them is 
one. This whole misguided and preposterous theory 
of education with all the harm it has caused the young 
of many generations is only another one of those many 
confusions which language has caused through our 
uncritical tendency to substitute words for things. 
Memory is just a word, there is no such a thing. 
Only memories exist, and these memories are always 
of this, that, or the other happening. Reason is 
just a word, there is no such thing. Only reason- 
ings exist, and they are always reasonings about the 
high cost of living or the war in Europe or the 
Mexican situation or some other particular question. 
If we want folks to remember things which are worth 
remembering, we must let the memory alone and help 
them to memorize the particular things which are 
worth remembering. If we want them to reason 
about the things which are worth reasoning about, 
we must let the reason alone and devote ourselves to 
the specific task of reasoning about that which we 
want to reason about. This, that, or the other can 
be memorized or reasoned about, but the skill is 
limited to the content about which it is generated. 
The more limited and specialized the content is 
which the student works with, the more fixed and 
limited are the actions which he learns to perform 
and the more a specialist he becomes. He may learn 
to reason about cases, moods, and tenses in such a 



DOCTRINE OF GENERAL DISCIPLINE 93 

way as to distinguish them with nearly unerring 
accuracy, but the more he fixates the forms of words 
the less will he fixate the thoughts which they 
normally call forth ; and the more of a specialist in 
verbal forms he becomes, the less of a specialist in 
meanings he will be, for thoughts and meanings 
must be neglected in order that forms and endings 
may be fixated. 

To the objection that there must be such a thing 
as general discipline or the many thousands of young 
men who for nearly two centuries have been sub- 
jected to a strictly formal training could never 
have become as proficient leaders in the affairs of 
life as so many of them became, we have only to 
answer that they perhaps became proficient in other 
things in spite of these studies, not because of them. 
When we remember that the young people who pur- 
sued these formal studies were a selected company 
of the leading spirits in their generation when they 
were admitted to the schools, it is not unreasonable 
to suppose that some of them, at least, retained their 
natural superiority, not quite unimpaired to be sure, 
but in a marked degree, even after submitting them- 
selves to forms of work which do not seem to have 
been productive. 

At any rate, it must be noted that those who 
contend that our minds are trained to do one thing 
by doing another have never yet proved their case, 
though the burden of proof is on them since they make 
the assertion. That failure has not been due to an 
oversight on their part either, but rather to the fact 
that their case can not be proven. 



94 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

In all this there is one confusion which we must keep 
clear of. When we say that all training is specific 
we do not mean that education should be narrow. It 
can not be that and be the kind of education that we 
want or that most people want. It was suJ05cient for 
the hunter to teach his son to shoot with the bow and 
arrow, but we have many kinds of bows and arrows 
now, rifles and 42-centimeter guns and systems of 
national and international law and morals and 
sciences and histories and literatures and philoso- 
phies. They are all instruments which we must learn 
to work and each one must be taught to shoot with 
a representative number of them. But general 
education in this sense is a combination of special or 
particular forms of education. 



DOES THE STUDY OF MATHEMATICS 
TRAIN THE MIND SPECIFICALLY OR 
UNIVERSALLY ?i 

Education is, or at least aims to be, a conscious 
process and a purposive undertaking. To teach 
anything we must first know what purpose is to be 
served by it and how it must be taught so that that 
purpose will be served. As there are many subjects 
which might be studied and many ways in which 
each one of them might be presented, our first and 
continuing duty is to select from the whole number 
of possible subjects those few which are indispensable 
for the purposes of life, and when we have done that, 
we must next select from the many possible ways of 
studying these subjects those few ways of approaching 
them which are hkely to lead to valuable results. 

Now, why should one study anything? As nearly 
as I can discover there are three answers which are 
given to this question. First, we must study sub- 
jects because we owe it to them to do so. It is a 
debt of honor, of reverence, of obeisance, or worship 
which we should pay them. We do not study them 
for what they do for us or what they will enable 
us to do. They are the ends. We are the means. 
This is subject worship, a kind of liturgical devotion 

^ An address before the Association of Teachers of Mathematics in 
New England, April 28, 1917. 

95 



96 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

which we are told we must pay to science, hterature, 
mathematics, philosophy when they are hypos tatized 
into self -existing realities. Its favorite call to 
prayer is science for the sake of science, literature 
for the sake of literature, knowledge for the sake of 
knowledge, and art for art's sake. This is a 
peculiarly inhuman belief which annually requires 
the sacrifice of hecatombs of young lives. It seems 
to us to be just as idolatrous to worship the crea- 
tions of men's minds as to worship the creations of 
men's hands. We are recommended to beware of 
idols. The creator is more to be revered than his 
creation. WTien the creation is ascribed virtue in 
itself, the proper relations are reversed. Knowledge, 
art, science, literature, philosophy and mathematics 
exist for man's sake, not he for them. The question 
always is, what are they to him, what can he make 
out of them ? what can he do with them ? Knowl- 
edge can not be its own end. It must be for some- 
thing. It must perform some work, must offer some 
assistance, must serve some human purpose. We 
may take it on credit, but the time must come when 
it will pay some sort of dividends. If it does not, 
it is simply useless and unmeaning. It makes no 
difference in a world in which only such things are 
regarded as real as make a difference. 

The second reason for studying anything is that we 
can not get along without it. It is an indispensable 
aid to us in doing our work. It may serve us in 
many ways, but we want it because in days to come 
we shall use it. It is because we are going to read 
that we study reading, are going to write that we 



THE STUDY OF MATHEMATICS 97 

study writing, are going to use geography and history, 
literature and science as long as we live that we 
study geography, history, literature and science; 
and the parts of these studies which are outworn or 
have no definite utility we omit, giving our attention 
exclusively to those aspects of them which have 
abiding value. According to this view studies are 
for use and education is preparatory. There are 
so many difficult things that each one of us must 
know how to do in order to get on with nature and 
with our fellowmen, that the whole of life is not 
sufficient for us to learn them. All that we can do 
in youth is to master the beginnings of a few of the 
great human operations. Advanced life must help 
us to perfect our knowledge of them. From this 
point of view it is immeasurably important that we 
do not waste our time upon studies or parts of studies 
which we can not use in after years and immeasurably 
important that we study the subjects that have 
definite utility in such ways that we will go on using 
them and increasing our mastery of them through 
the years that are to come. The school, then, 
exists to provide special opportunities for us to 
become acquainted with the first stages of our life 
business and must introduce us to it in such a way 
that we shall, from the first, appreciate its meaning 
and perform it with a growing interest and an expand- 
ing sense of its worth, so that when our school days 
are over we shall know that our education has but 
begun and will go on applying and using and perfect- 
ing our skill in the great arts of which it has taught 
us the fundamentals as long as we may live. Educa- 



98 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

tion, according to this view, is specific throughout. 
Its purpose is to enable the student to acquire the be- 
ginnings of certain indispensable forms of human skill 
without which he can not be a society-supporting unit 
in a world in which men must live and let live and help 
themselves and each other in doing so. Every form 
of skill that we attempt to teach him gets its place 
in the school program solely because he can not live 
a civilized life without practicing it. Traditional 
reasons are not a suflScient warrant for teaching any- 
thing. The course of study is to be made with 
reference to the future, not because of veneration for 
the past or because of blind adherence to the prevail- 
ing practice of to-day. The training of the young 
is so serious a responsibility that it must be made 
throughout a conscious undertaking. Their time 
must not be wasted and their futures must not be 
trifled away. Nothing must be attempted in their 
education without demonstrable reasons for attempt- 
ing it. Few men who have not followed closely the 
advances which have been made in the science of 
education in recent years know how completely 
present-day educational theory differs from the 
crude traditionalism of an earlier time. The new 
efficiency program which schools are trying to put 
into practice now is first to analyze the habits we 
want the young to form, to set up specific aims by 
whittling our purposes to the finest point in helping 
them to form them, and to measure carefully the 
results which are brought about by instruction. The 
effort of to-day is to do away with aimless routinary 
education, by substituting for it an intelligent pro- 



THE STUDY OF MATHEMATICS 99 

cedure which shall be as rational as our present 
knowledge demands and warrants. 

The third reason which has been assigned for 
studying anything is not that we owe it to the thing 
we are invited to study to show it this tribute of 
respect and adoration, or that we shall need it in 
order to do our part in carrying on the unfinished 
business of the race. The third reason for studying 
certain subjects is that they perfect the mind and 
make it a better mind than it was before. The main 
province of the school, according to this view, is to train 
the mind not by putting it to work upon the matters 
it will have to work upon as long as it is a living mind, 
but to prepare it to work upon these matters by 
working upon others. This might be called in- 
direct education, because it maintains that the best 
way to learn to do one thing is to learn to do another. 
But if the theory were put as baldly as that, no one 
would believe it. It is couched in a more seductive 
form. Certain studies, we are told, teach us not only 
to work with their content, but to work with every 
content. They have far-reaching effects — they 
enable us to do everything we undertake better 
because we have pursued them. Much of our learn- 
ing we must get at retail, acquiring it painfully 
process by process and never getting any more than 
we bargain for, and mostly less. I have never 
heard teachers of history, for example, say that 
studying history teaches anything but history, or 
teachers of Spanish that studying Spanish teaches 
anything but Spanish. Just recently we have heard 
from eminent physical trainers that military training 



100 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

teaches military training and contributes nothing 
that makes for bodily well-being, but much that 
harms it. But I have heard teachers of Greek and 
Latin and French and German say that the study of 
their subjects is not intended to teach Greek or 
Latin or French or German. The study of their 
subjects is intended to improve the faculties of the 
mind. They claim to educate by wholesale, to give 
instruction in preferred subjects. They do not set 
out to teach their students the subjects which they 
study; they teach them, they say, something far 
more valuable. There are many variants of this 
claim and as nearly as I can discover no one knows 
exactly what they mean. I heard one man say in a 
discussion a while ago that he took it as established 
that we must sharpen an ax on some other material 
than that which we proposed to cut with it, likening 
the mind to an ax and the studies which he espoused 
to a grindstone ; but the mind which God gave us is 
a pretty sharp instrument from the beginning, and 
we do not need to get inside it to do any burnishing 
or repair work there. 

I find in Professor Keyser's interesting discussion 
of mathematics ^ some statements which are puzzling 
and very hard to make out. He says : 

The science is no catholicon for mental disease. There is no 
power for transforming mediocrity into genius. It can not 
enrich where nature has impoverished. It makes no pretense of 
creating faculty where none exists, of opening springs in desert 
minds. . . . The great mathematician, like the great poet or 
the great administrator, is born. My contention shall be that 
where the mathematic endowment is found there will usually 

^ Keyser, Mathematics, Columbia University Press, New York, 1907. 



THE STUDY OF MATHEMATICS 101 

be found associated with it, as essential implications of it, other 
endowments in generous measure, and that the appeal of the 
science is to the whole mind, direct no doubt to the central 
powers of thought, but indirectly through sympathy of all, 
rousing, enlarging, developing, emancipating all, so that the 
faculties of will, of intellect and feeling learn to respond, each 
in its appropriate order and degree, like the parts of an orchestra 
to the "urge and ardor" of its leader and lord. 

If the study of mathematics can do that or any- 
thing Hke that it is clear that we must all study 
mathematics, for though many of us have little 
occasion to use more than the merest elements of this 
great science, we all want our minds aroused, en- 
larged, developed and emancipated so that the 
faculties of will and intellect and feeling will respond. 
But is Professor Keyser not claiming too much ? If 
mathematics could indeed do these things would it 
not be the philosophers' stone .^ And if it can do 
these things I trust it will not be thought im- 
pertinent to ask why it has not done them. Surely 
no greater harm can be done to any science than to 
overestimate its claims and mistake its nature, and no 
greater harm can be done to the young than to submit 
them to a laborious and time-consuming discipline 
if we are not certain that that discipline can accom- 
plish what we claim that it can accomplish. 

Let us stop long enough to understand each other. 
The question which we are to consider is not the 
question of the value of mathematics — nobody 
doubts its value to any one who has occasion to use it. 
The question we are to consider is whether it is to 
be regarded as unlike other studies which are valuable 
to those who use them and not of much account to 



102 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

those who do not, but is instead a preferred study 
which is to be pursued not for the sake of what we 
can do with it, but for the sake of what it will do to 
us. The value of mathematics as a tool, a human 
device for doing its part of the work of the world, is 
not disputed — it never has been. The value of 
mathematics as a universal discipline is not proven ; 
it is disputed. Does learning mathematics teach 
mathematics as Robert Browning said that "learning 
Greek teaches Greek and nothing else; certainly 
not common sense if that have failed to precede the 
teaching"? Or does learning mathematics teach 
reasoning in general, not to say anything of its 
power to arouse, enlarge, develop, and emancipate 
the faculties of will and feeling ? 

If we go back to the Greeks who invented this great 
science, we find them taking pains to put limits to 
their reliance upon it. In the "Memorabilia" of 
Xenophon we are told that Socrates had very decided 
views as to the value of geometry. 

Every one (he would say) ought to be taught geometry so far, 
at any rate, as to be able, if necessary, to take over or part with 
a piece of land, or to divide it up or assign a portion for cultiva- 
tion, and in every case by geometric rule. That amount of 
geometry was so simple indeed and easy to learn, that it only 
needed ordinary application of the mind to the method of men- 
suration, and the student could at once ascertain the size of the 
piece of land, and with the satisfaction of knowing its measure- 
ment depart in peace. But he was unable to approve of the 
pursuit of geometry up to the point at which it became a study of 
unintelligible diagrams. What the use of these might be he 
failed, he said, to see; and yet he was not unversed in these 
recondite matters himself. These things, he would say, were 



THE STUDY OF MATHEMATICS 103 

enough to wear out a man's life and to hinder him from many 
more useful studies. . . . Socrates inculcated the study of 
reasoning processes, but in these equally with the rest, he bade 
the student beware of vain and idle over-occupation. Up to the 
limit set by utility he was ready to join in any investigation and 
to follow out an argument with those who were with him ; but 
there he stopped. ^ 

This passage is thoroughly in keeping with 
Cleanthes's statement that Socrates cursed as 
impious "him who first sundered the just from the 
useful." Socrates's disciple, Plato, made a larger use 
of mathematics in the course of study which he 
outlined for the few selected youths whom he pro- 
posed to train to be philosopher-kings in the Republic 
of his vision. You will remember that he prescribed 
for them a ten-years' course in arithmetic, geometry, 
astronomy and music, because ** these studies lead 
naturally to reflection, but seem never to have been 
rightly used." The example which he gives of the 
way in which he would use these studies shows that he 
did not rely upon such a knowledge of them as our 
students are invited to get to lead his disciples to 
reflection. 

When there is some contradiction always present and one is the 
reverse of one and involves the conception of plurality, then 
thought begins to be aroused within us and the soul, per- 
plexed and wanting to arrive at a decision, asks: "What is 
absolute unity.?" This is the way in which the study of the 
one has a power of drawing and converting the mind to the 
contemplation of true being. You are right, he said, the 
observation of the unit does certainly possess this property in no 
common degree, for the same thing presents at the same moment 
the appearance of one thing and an infinity of things.^ 

1 Xenophon, Memorabilia, IV, 7. 2 RepubHc, 524 and 525. 



104 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

Plato's study of arithmetic is undertaken to 
consider the nature of numbers, and his geometry, 
the nature of space. It is intended to lead the student 
to discover the reality of mind, to know himself the 
thinker, not the science of mathematics. Will ten 
years of such study give him a trained mind ? These 
studies he says are 

useful, that is, if sought after with a view to the beautiful and 
good ; but if pursued in any other spirit, useless. . . . Do you 
not know that this is only the prelude of the actual strain which 
we have to learn ? For you surely would not regard the skilled 
mathematician as a dialectician? Assuredly not, he said. I 
have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of 
reasoning. 

We find Aristotle, too, declaring that 

the man of education will seek exactness so far in each subject 
as the nature of the thing admits, it being plainly much the same 
absurdity to put up with a mathematician who tries to persuade 
instead of proving, and to demand strict demonstrative reasoning 
of a rhetorician. Now each man judges well what he knows and 
of these things he is a good judge : on each particular matter he 
is a good judge who has been instructed in it, and in a general 
way the man of general cultivation.^ 

But this general cultivation is to be gotten by famil- 
iarity with many subjects, not from the study of any 
one subject. 

The capacity of receiving knowledge is modified by the habits 
of the recipient mind. For as we have been habituated to learn, 
do we deem that everything ought to be taught, and the same 
object, presented in an unfamiliar manner, strikes us not only 
as unlike itself, but from want of custom as comparatively 
strange and unknown. . . . We ought therefore to be educated 

1 Ethics, 10946. 



THE STUDY OF MATHEMATICS 105 

to the different modes and amount of evidence which the 
different objects of our knowledge admit.^ 

There is no recognition of mathematics as teach- 
ing more than mathematics here. These Greeks do 
not rely upon it as a training in universal reasoning. 

No such claim is made for the study until the 
faculty psychology brought faculty education in its 
train some time about the beginning of the 18th 
century. Faculty psychology is everywhere recog- 
nized as false doctrine since the criticism of Herbart 
gave it its deathblow in the early years of the 
19th century. But faculty education still remains, 
though the psychologists tell us that there are no 
faculties to be educated. This of itself is a curious 
commentary upon the unscientific character of our 
education. 

But before I consider the claim that mathe- 
matics trains the faculty of reasoning I want to 
point out that there have from its first appear- 
ance as a philosophy of education been almost or 
quite as many competent critics of this doctrine as 
upholders of it. I trust I shall not unduly tax your 
patience if I refer to that remarkable article " On the 
Study of Mathematics as an Exercise of Mind," 
which Sir William Hamilton published in 1836. Pro- 
fessor Keyser calls it "Sir William Hamilton's 
famous and terrific diatribe against the science," 
but opinions of mathematicians seem to differ about 
it, for Professor Young finds it instructive to the 
teacher of mathematics and regards it as "a pity 
that more such criticisms are not made." Whatever 

^ Metaphysics, II, 3. 



106 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

else Sir William Hamilton's essay may be, it is not a 
diatribe against the science of mathematics. He says 
expressly : 

In the first place that the question does not regard the value of 
mathematical science considered in itself, or in its objective results, 
but the utility of mathematical study, that is, in its subjective 
effect, as an exercise of mind; and in the second, that the 
expediency is not disputed, of leaving mathematics as a co5r- 
dinate, to find their level among the other branches of academical 
instruction. It is only contended that they ought not to be 
made the principal, far less the exclusive object of academical 
encouragement. We speak not now of professional but of liberal 
education ; not of that which considers the mind as an instrument 
for the improvement of science, but of this which considers 
science as an instrument for the improvement of mind. Of all 
our intellectual pursuits the study of the mathematical sciences 
is the one whose utility as an intellectual exercise when carried 
beyond a moderate extent has been most peremptorily denied 
by the greatest number of the most competent judges ; and the 
arguments on which this opinion is established have hitherto been 
evaded rather than opposed. 

If any one has any doubt about the number of 
opinions which he musters to support his contention 
"that the tendency of a too exclusive study of these 
sciences is absolutely to disqualify the mind for 
observation and common reasoning, " he has only to 
consult the article to learn how numerous they are. 
And I do not think it is fair to refute this article by 
ascribing it to "jealousy, vanity and parade of learn- 
ing," or to set it aside by declaring "that Hamilton 
by studied selections and omissions deliberately and 
maliciously misrepresented the great authors from 
whom he quoted — d'Alembert, Blaise Pascal, Des- 
cartes and others, distorting their express and un- 



THE STUDY OF MATHEMATICS 107 

mistakable meaning, even to the extent of complete 
inversion." ^ It is easy to make charges against men 
who quote. That is a familiar line of attack. They 
can be charged with quoting what they should not 
have quoted, or with not quoting what they should 
have quoted. Such charges divert attention from 
what one has quoted but they do not answer it. 
The question is not whether Sir William Hamilton 
quotes less than there is to quote — every one who 
quotes at all, selects what he will quote — and the 
question is not whether the statement which he 
quotes in any given case is the average statement of 
its author upon the subject or the final result of a 
lifelong consideration of it. These men may have 
said other things at other times and in other places. 
They could hardly have been mathematicians with- 
out doing so. The question is whether they also at 
any time or in any place said what Sir William Hamil- 
ton quotes them as saying. Did d'Alembert ever 
say "we shall content ourselves with the remark 
that if mathematics (as is asserted with suflficient 
reason) only make straight the minds which are 
without a bias, so they only dry up and chill the 
minds already prepared for this operation by 
nature." ^ It is plain that if he contented himself 
with that remark, we must be contented with that 
remark as coming from him. And did Descartes 
say that "the study of mathematics principally exer- 
cises the imagination in the consideration of figures 

* Keyser, " Mathematics," pp. 23, 24, Columbia University Press, 
1907. 

» " Melanges," IV, p. 184, 1763. 



108 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

and motions " ^ and to another correspondent "that 
part of the mind, to wit the imagination which is 
principally conducive to a skill in mathematics, is of 
greater detriment than service for metaphysical 
speculations," ^ and did Descartes's biographer, 
Baillet, write: 

It was now a long time since lie had been convinced of the small 
utility of the mathematics, especially when studied on their own 
account, and not applied to other things. There was nothing in 
truth which appeared to him more futile than to occupy our- 
selves with simple numbers and imaginary figures, as if it were 
proper to confine ourselves to these trifles without carrying our 
view beyond. There even seemed to him in this something 
worse than useless. His maxim was that such application in- 
sensibly disaccustomed us to the use of our reason and made us 
run the danger of losing the path which it traces. 

And does his Life contain the statement that in 
a letter to Mersenne, written in 1630 : 

M. Descartes recalled to him that he had renounced the study 
of mathematics for many years ; and that he was anxious not to 
lose any more of his time in the barren operations of geometry and 
arithmetic, studies which never led to anything important. 

And does the author of Descartes's life in a later 
passage say "in regard to the rest of mathematics" 
(he has just been speaking of astronomy) 

those who know the rank which he held above all mathe- 
maticians, ancient and modern, will agree that he was the man 
in the world best qualified to judge them. We have observed 
that after having studied these sciences to the bottom, he had 
renounced them as of no use for the conduct of life and solace 
of mankind.3 

^"Lettres," pp. i-xxx. *"Epist.," pp. ii-xxxiii. 

• "La Vie de Descartes," I, pp. Ill, 112, 225. 



THE STUDY OF MATHEMATICS 109 

It is no answer to such citations to make a great bluster 
about other statements which might have been 
quoted and to draw back from these as though it were 
a profanation even to think of them. The question 
which must be faced is : Did d'Alembert and Des- 
cartes and Descartes 's biographer ever at any time 
say these things ? The one legitimate way to attack 
Sir William Hamilton's use of them as evidence is to 
deny that they are to be found in the writings of these 
men. That denial is not made and can not be made. 
These are statements which d'Alembert, Descartes 
and Descartes's biographer made, and made in words 
which mean exactly what we have indicated, and 
must be reckoned with. 

The passage which is quoted from Pascal is 
quoted at length. In it Pascal says : 

There is a great difference between the spirit of mathematics 
and the spirit of observation. In the former the principles are 
palpable but remote from common use; so that from want of 
custom it is not easy to turn our head in that direction ; but if it 
be turned ever so little, the principles are seen fully confessed, 
and it would argue a mind incorrigiblj'^ false to reason in- 
consequently on principles so obtrusive that it is hardly possible 
to overlook them. But in the field of observation, the principles 
are in common use and before the eyes of all. We need not 
turn our heads, to make any effort whatsoever. Nothing is 
wanted beyond a good sight; but good it must be; for the 
principles are so minute and numerous that it is hardly possible 
but some of them should escape. The omission, however, of 
a single principle leads to error ; it is, therefore, requisite to have 
a sight of the clearest to discern all the principles ; and then a 
correct intellect to avoid false reasonings on known principles. 
All mathematicians would, thus, be observant had they good 
sight, for they do not reason falsely on the principles they know ; 



110 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

and minds of observation would be mathematical could they 
turn their view toward the unfamiliar principles of mathematics. 
The cause why certain observant minds are not mathematical is 
because they are wholly unable to turn themselves toward the 
principles of mathematics ; but the reason why there are mathe- 
maticians void of observation is that they do not see what lies 
before them, and that accustomed to the clear and palpable 
principles of mathematics and only to reason after these principles 
have been well seen and handled they lose themselves in matters 
of observation where the principles do not allow of being thus 
treated. These objects are seen with difficulty; nay, are felt 
rather than seen, and it is with infinite pains that others can be 
made to feel them if they have not already felt them without aid. 
They are so delicate and numerous that to be felt they require a 
very fine and a very clear sense. They can also seldom be 
demonstrated in succession as is done in mathematics, for we 
are not in possession of their principles, while the very attempt 
would of itself be endless. The object must be discovered at 
once by a single glance and not by a course of reasoning, at least 
up to a certain point. Thus it is rare that mathematicians are 
observant and that observant minds are mathematical ; because 
mathematicians would treat matters of observation by rule of 
mathematics, and make themselves ridiculous by attempting to 
commence by definitions and by principles, a mode of procedure 
incompatible with this kind of reasoning.^ 

But Sir William Hamilton is not satisfied with this 
showing that in learning mathematics we do not learn 
to reason about all things, but only about mathe- 
matics ; he quotes from scores of other persons to the 
same efiPect. His argument is not met by Professor 
Young's statement, that as mathematics was then 
taught the subject had, as Sir William Hamilton 
contended, but small value, "but mathematics is no 
longer taught as a purely passive subject to-day." 

* " Pens^es de Pascal," p. 1, Article X. 



THE STUDY OF MATHEMATICS 111 

That may be true and it is good news if it is true, but 
Sir William's point is that mathematics can not be 
taught in such a way as to enable the student who 
has studied it, no matter now diligently, to reason 
well about everything. Its lessons have no such 
universal reference and its methods of reasoning no 
such universal applicability. The reasoning which 
life exacts of us is upon contingent matter, the 
reasoning to which mathematics habituates us is 
upon necessary matter. In mathematics the prem- 
ises are given ; in life for the most part they must be 
found. The question we try to answer in mathe- 
matics is what conclusions follow from these prem- 
ises; the question we are forced to answer in life 
is, of what principle is this case an instance or under 
what principle does this particular belong. 

The case against mathematics, not as a science 
but as a universal trainer of the mind, has become 
very much stronger since 1836 than it was in Sir 
William Hamilton's brilliant summary of it. To the 
crowd of witnesses whom he summoned, the names of 
Huxley and Comte and many another leader of 
human thought must now be added. The break- 
down and abandonment of the faculty psychology 
left the doctrine of faculty education literally with- 
out a leg to stand on. If instead of one memory we 
have as many memories as the things we remember, 
we can not train or develop the memory, for there is 
none to train. If our nature is so economical that 
we forget all the things which we have no occasion to 
remember and remember only those things in which 
we have taken a lively interest or about which we 



in WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

have built up a net of associations, then the way to 
develop one's memory is to make no effort to develop 
it, but to spend one's strength instead in finding 
reasons for being interested in the thing which we 
want to remember. Let the memory alone, take no 
memory-training lessons, give up forever the notion 
that a memory ever existed outside of the world of 
fancy which could remember all things equally well, 
let the memory alone and give your whole attention 
to comprehending what you want to remember. 
That is all that you or any one else can do. This, 
you see, requires us to shift our attention wholly 
from the mind to the content. 

The same criticism applies to the training of the 
reason. No such faculty exists. We reason well 
about one interest and badly about another. Such a 
thing as an all-round reasoner is not to be found. 
The agriculturalist reasons well about growing crops, 
the commission merchant knows more about how to 
sell them. The geologist reasons well about rocks, 
the biologist about vital processes, the lawyer about 
laws, the engineer about the strength of materials, 
the physician about diseases, and the tax expert 
about the incidents of taxation. The United States 
wants 150,000 ship carpenters. House carpenters 
will not do. We are specialists all. The study of 
mathematics makes a specialist out of the man who 
pursues it as his life work. How can the same study 
that makes specialists out of adults make generalists 
out of the young ? When we study mathematics we 
learn to make analyses, but to analyze the mathe- 
matical given is not the same thing, nor even the 



THE STUDY OF MATHEMATICS 113 

same sort of thing, as to resolve an economic situation 
into its constituent elements, or a historical period 
into the forces which are operating in it, or a crime 
into the factors which indicate its authorship. 
There are many forms of analysis, and only the man 
who is familiar with a given subject matter can 
resolve it into its parts. The same thing is true of 
inferences and of the tracing of relations. The type 
of analysis or inference which is valid in one field 
is not valid in another. The universe of facts is no 
snug-fitting box with interchangeable parts which we 
can put together and take apart in a few well- 
defined ways. It is infinitely complex, and he who is 
being trained to operate any part of it must be 
familiar with the characteristics of his particular 
field of fact and the processes of manipulation which 
belong to it. Says Professor Dewey, in speaking of 
the doctrine of formal discipline : 

Going to the root of the matter, the fundamental fallacy 
of the theory is its dualism ; that is to say, its separation 
of activities and capacities from subject matter. There is no 
such thing as an ability to see or hear or remember in general ; 
there is only the ability to see or hear or remember some- 
thing. To talk about training a power, mental or physical, 
in general, apart from the subject matter involved in its exer- 
cise, is nonsense. 

If we turn to the experimental studies which have 
been made upon this subject, we must note that they 
were not undertaken to inquire whether the memory, 
or the imagination, or the observation, or the reason 
can be trained as a faculty. No one who is at all 
conversant with modern psychology takes that 



114 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

question with any seriousness whatever. Any in- 
vestigation of it would be a mere waste of time. 

Since the psychologists agree that we have a 
different memory for everything we remember, a 
different attention for everything to which we attend, 
a different imagination for everything we imagine, 
and a different reasoning for everything we reason 
about, why should there be any investigation to find 
out to what extent learning to do one thing will 
help us to do another.'^ The answer is that though 
our acts are different, some of them have common 
elements and call forth identical responses. If we 
learn to count marbles, we can count eggs, for the 
act is the same in both cases, but it does not follow 
that if we learn to count objects we can count ab- 
stractions ; that is a new art and must be learned, 
nor does it follow that if we can count abstractions, 
we can successfully number objects. There is a 
great gulf fixed between theoretical and practical 
arithmetic and between theoretical and practical 
mathematics throughout. A banker friend of mine 
declares that counting money in a large bank is so 
different from counting money in a small bank that 
city banks hesitate to employ as assistants men who 
have been trained in country banks. There is much 
that is common to the two processes, but there is at 
the same time so much that is different that training 
in one does not prepare for the other. 

One who learns to drive a Packard car can drive 
a Stanley steamer — that is, he can steer it, for he 
is only doing over again what he has already learned 
to do — but one who can adjust a Packard engine 



THE STUDY OF MATHEMATICS 115 

can not adjust the engine in a Stanley steamer with- 
out a special knowledge of that engine. 

The ability to use the knowledge which we have 
acquired in one connection in another is sometimes 
said to be due to a transfer of training. Professor 
Dewey tells us that **in the literal sense any transfer 
is miraculous and impossible." What then does the 
transfer which is said to take place really mean? 
Learning to drive a Packard car enables one to drive a 
Stanley steamer, because when we drive the steamer 
we are simply doing over again what we have already 
learned to do. Nothing is transferred; instead, an 
act we have already learned to perform is repeated 
in a context very like the context in which it was 
learned. If we could transfer our training from 
one context to another quite freely, we would not go 
on merely repeating what we have already learned. 
We would all become inventors. The fact that 
inventions are and always have been so rare shows 
quite clearly that we do not do that. We do over 
and over again what we have already learned to do ; 
but within what limits do we repeat our familiar 
reactions? That is the question which the experi- 
mentalists are answering and their answers all show 
that the limits go but a little way beyond the lesson 
itself and that the range of its application is very 
narrow indeed. 

Some of these experiments seek to determine the 
effects of training in mathematics upon the perform- 
ance of other kinds of work. One of them is the series 
of tests conducted by Lewis at Dartmouth. Two 
test papers were prepared, one containing three 



116 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

originals in geometry, the other three questions in 
practical reasoning concerning the value of high- 
school education to the student and the community. 
Both papers were submitted to twenty -four different 
groups of high-school students. The results I give in 
Mr. Lewis's own words : 

If we take the first five mathematical reasoners from each of the 
24 groups, we have in all one hundred and twenty pupils most 
excellent in mathematical reasoning. Of this number 76 or 63 
per cent are at the foot of the practical reasoning series, con- 
spicuous for their inefficiency in practical reasoning. Of the 
number of pupils at the foot of the mathematical reasoning 
series, 57 or 47 per cent are conspicuous for their positions at 
the head of the practical reasoning series. 

To supplement this test the records of Dartmouth 
students in the classes in mathematics and in courses 
in law were compared. The results were much the 
same. 

Fifty per cent of the best students in law were conspicuous for 
their poor showing in mathematics and 42 per cent of those 
poorest in law stood at the head of the series in mathematics. 

More recently at the University of Illinois Dr. 
Rugg conducted a classroom experiment in which 
two groups, one of 413 and the other of 87 college 
students, were first measured for efficiency in the 
mental manipulation of spatial elements. The first 
group of 413 students then took a regular course in 
descriptive geometry during a college semester of 15 
weeks. The other group of 87 college students had 
no such training during this interval. At the end 
of the 15 weeks both groups were again measured as 
they had been at the beginning to discover the effect 



THE STUDY OF MATHEMATICS 117 

of the course in descriptive geometry which the one 
group had taken and the other had not, upon specific 
abilities in the mental manipulation of spatial ele- 
ments, (a) of a strictly geometrical type; (6) of a 
quasi-geometrical type ; and (c) of a non-geometrical 
type. What was the result ? Members of both the 
trained and the untrained group showed improvement 
in taking the test series a second time. But there 
were 44 per cent more gainers in speed in the trained 
group than in the untrained, and nearly two thirds 
again as large a proportion of the trained group as 
of the untrained group gained in accuracy. Of the 
group that had the training not all gained, and of the 
group that did not have the training a very large 
number gained as much as those who had had it. 
How many individuals gained .^^ 

In "Attempts" 67.8 per cent of the training group and 42.5 
per cent of the control group gain in 60 per cent or more of the 
tests taken. 

That is, 42| folks out of every hundred who did 
not have the training took the tests as successfully 
as 68 out of every hundred who did have it. That is, 
the course seems to have been of some positive assist- 
ance in preparing only 25| folks out of each hundred 
to take the test. To 32 out of every hundred who 
took it, it was no help, and 42^ of every hundred who 
took it got on just as well without it as with it, that 
is, so far as attempts went. 

In "Rights" 72.7 per cent of the training group and 31 per 
cent of the control group gain in 60 per cent or more of the tests 
taken. 



118 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

If 72.7 per cent who took the training gained, we 
may conclude that 27 out of every hundred who took 
it did not gain, and as 31 per cent of those who did 
not have it did as well as those who did have it, only 
42 out of every hundred became more accurate be- 
cause of it, while 58 did not ; thus you see the chances 
seem to be about 6 to 4 against expecting anything 
in the way of general training, that is, training which 
is not strictly specific, from such a course. On Dr. 
Rugg's showing, the dice are loaded against every 
student who takes this course for general training. 

It is true, as he points out, that more of those who 
took the training gained than of those who did not, 
but a considerable number of those who took it did 
not gain, and a very considerable number of those 
who did not take it gained. So to gain it is not 
necessary to take it, and if one does take it, there is 
no certainty that he will gain. 

These are his figures, but this is not Dr. Rugg's 
conclusion. His conclusion is that these results 
supply confirmatory evidence of the "transfer of 
training"; though, as he says, his data do not, of 
course, establish conclusively the possibility of 
transfer. It is not the possibility of transfer but 
rather the actuality of transfer that concerns edu- 
cators. His results, like those of all the experi- 
mental studies I have seen, seem to me to assist 
materially in establishing the fact that we can not 
any longer make a philosophy of education out of 
the doctrine of formal discipline, and they very 
positively confirm the suspicion with which any such 
attempt must be met. The burden of proof rests 



THE STUDY OF MATHEMATICS 119 

upon those who uphold this theory. It has never 
been proven, and until it is proven, it is mere conjec- 
ture, wholly insufficient as a theory of instruction. 

Education is too serious a business to be allowed to 
proceed upon chances which are mathematically 
known to be against the student. Some of those 
who have investigated the question whether training 
is transferred declare that it is not. Some affirm 
that under certain conditions it is sometimes and in 
some degree; but even when they declare that it is 
transferred, the evidence of transfer is so inconclusive, 
and the amount of the so-called transfer is so slight 
and the expectation of it so uncertain, that it is the 
part of wisdom no longer to build houses of learning 
upon the shifting sands of this doctrine. The in- 
vestigations have put a cloud upon the title of this 
theory of education which can not be removed. It 
simply does not work. On the solid rock of specific 
education we can build and must build, for of the 
results of specific education we can be sure, but as for 
formal or general discipline, in the words of Professor 
Spearman : 

The great assumption upon which education has rested for so 
many centuries is now at last rendered amenable to experimental 
corroboration — and it proves to be false. 



MATHEMATICS AND FORMAL DISCIPLINE 

AGAIN 1 

My thesis was not that experiences are not gen- 
erahzed; everybody knows they are sometimes and 
in some degree. My thesis was that you can not 
make a philosophy of education out of that. You 
can not make a philosophy of education out of the 
doctrine of formal discipline in any of its inter- 
pretations in its present highly unsatisfactory con- 
dition. What Mr. Moore says seems to me to sup- 
port that contention. He objects to reading what 
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, or Pascal said 
about the teaching of mathematics as having any 
bearing upon present-day reasons for teaching that 
subject. It is usually regarded as proper to inquire 
into the history of a doctrine whenever its meaning 
or its sufficiency is in question. There is special 
reason for calling these particular men to testify as 
to the teaching of mathematics as formal discipline, 
for they are commonly regarded as the authors of that 
theory. To show that they were, in fact, opposed 
to it is to locate its origin in other and perhaps in 
less worthy quarters. 

The manyness of the opinions cited in favor of 
mathematics as general discipline in Morwitz's 

1 A reply to "The Inadequacy of Arguments against Disciplinary 
Values" by Charles N. Moore, School and Society, Dec. 29, 1917. 

120 



MATHEMATICS AND FORMAL DISCIPLINE 121 

"Memorabilia Mathematica " has little to do with 
the matter, though the quality and effect of their 
authors' reasoning may be worth considering. 

I do not think Mr. Moore read far enough in 
Comte's "Positive Philosophy" to get Comte's 
point of view. I commend to him the chapter en- 
titled "Final Estimate of the Positive Method," 
where he will find many statements about mathe- 
matics, among them these : 

According to my theory, mathematics necessarily prevailed 
during the long training of the human mind to positivism ; and 
sociology alone can guide genuine speculation when its basis is 
once fully ascertained. . . . We have seen throughout this 
work that mathematical science is the source of positivity ; but 
we have also seen that mathematical conceptions are by their 
nature incapable of forming a genuine, complete and universal 
philosophy. . . . The fruitlessness of the notion is no evidence 
that it was given up by scientific men, who have still hoped, with 
every accession of discovery, to find their mathematical principle 
universally applicable at last; and the practical effect of their 
persuasion was simply to prejudice them against any other 
systematic conception, and even against any portion of natural 
philosophy which was too complex to be brought under mathe- 
matical management. . . . The comparative method proper 
to biology, and the historical method proper to sociology are the 
two greatest of logical creations achieved in the face of extreme 
scientific difficulties ; but the disgraceful ignorance of almost all 
geometers of these two transcendent methods of logical investi- 
gations shows that it was not mathematics that furnished 
the conception, though some examples of them may be found in 
mathematical science, fruitless and unintelligible to all who have 
not derived them from their original source. So much for the 
logical estimate. 

As for the scientific, the superiority of the sociological spirit 
is no less evident in regard to the universality required. Though 
the geometrical and mechanical point of view is universal, in as far 



122 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

as that the laws of extension and motion operate in an elementary 
way upon all phenomena whatever, yet, however valuable may 
be the special indications thence arising, they can never even 
in the simplest cases obviate the necessity of a direct study of 
the subject ; and that direct study must always be the prepon- 
derant one. 

As to the study of mathematics having an effect 
when it is taken sparingly in youth that it does not 
have if persisted in in age, that is an assumption 
that has long puzzled me. I confess to inability to 
understand how a study which makes specialists of 
adults can have the opposite effect of making 
generalists of boys and girls. It seems to me it 
must have the same kind of effect upon both and 
that what we mean is that we want everybody to 
pursue the special lessons of mathematics up to a 
certain point and beyond that point they will not 
be useful for all just because they are special lessons. 
But that is to abandon the mystical value of mathe- 
matics altogether, which the fate which overtakes the 
adult specialist warns us to do. 

Mr. Moore advises me to follow Professor Han- 
cock's example and collect the opinions of "prom- 
inent lawyers, physicians, ministers and men of 
affairs," as to what the young of our day should 
study and why. Professor Snedden has already 
pointed out the insufficiency of that method. It 
seems to me to employ the doctrine of general dis- 
cipline with a vengeance. How the opinions of these 
men upon the study of mathematics can be any 
better than their opinions upon dietetics, I do not 
quite see. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, at least. 



MATHEMATICS AND FORMAL DISCIPLINE 123 

spent their lives in thinking about education. There 
is no statute of limitations against their work. 

Fully ninety per cent of the teachers whom I have 
met in schools and colleges and nearly one hundred 
per cent of the parents whom I have been privileged 
to know still believe that young people attend school 
in order that the faculties of their minds may be 
improved and perfected. It was folks of that kind 
I was addressing The " transf erists " have done 
little to banish that superstition. It is time for them 
to publicly acknowledge that they are talking about 
something quite different. To say that the doctrine 
of formal discipline does not depend upon the faculty 
psychology is to use words contrary to general accep- 
tation without defining them and thereby to per- 
petuate and foster an erroneous conception which 
should long since have been rooted from the popular 
mind. In spite of statements to the contrary there 
are some things we could conceivably do with facul- 
ties if we had them that we can not do with functions. 
If we still believed in faculties, we might insist — the 
thing is done sometimes — that training a soldier 
to shoot with a rifle trains him at the same time to 
shoot with a revolver, a trench mortar, a French 75, 
to dig trenches, throw hand grenades, use the 
bayonet, and cut barbed wire without making a 
noise. For is not his faculty of soldiering being 
trained? As long as we do not believe in faculties 
we are more modest in our expectations. We perhaps 
agree that no matter how well he shoots with a rifle 
he must nevertheless have specific lessons in the 
use of the bayonet, in throwing hand grenades, in 



124 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

digging trenches, and in cutting wire. On the other 
hand, most of us perhaps would admit that there is 
something in common between shooting with a rifle 
and shooting with a cannon, a trench mortar or a 
revolver. These arts are in some sense one; but 
our government can not train its soldiers on that 
basis. It gives them lessons in the use of all the 
arms. Any one who cares to can conduct experi- 
ments to determine just what degree of knowledge 
is carried over from rifle-shooting to grenade-throw- 
ing or operating a big gun. The question is not 
without interest, but its answer will not materially 
change the specific training which the nation gives 
its soldiers. 

Mr. Moore believes that the process of reasoning 
can be acquired apart from the data upon which it is 
to be used. Faculties or no faculties, that is the 
inveterate error of formal discipline, its separation 
of activities from the subject matter of their action. 
I can not do better than to quote Professor Dewey 
upon this fundamental fallacy : 

To talk about training a power, mental or physical, in general, 
apart from the subject matter involved in its exercise, is nonsense. 

Mr. F. C. Lewis's results are, to be sure, not final. 
They are simple enumerations of facts as he found 
them. They can not, I think, be tortured into mean- 
ing anything but a challenge to the other side to 
prove its case. Mr. Moore declares that my error 
in regard to Dr. Rugg's experiments is in believing 
that we can obtain "very precise results by the use 
of data which are not themselves very precise." 



MATHEMATICS AND FORMAL DISCIPLINE 125 

That is exactly what I protested against the other side 
doing. If the results are not precise, how can they 
be more precise for the doctrine than against it? 
Dr. Rugg's summary of the results of the experi- 
mental studies thus far made seems to me to be 
admirable : 

The experimentation has not led to the acceptance of a belief 
in that widespread improvement that was expected by the old 
formal-disciplinists prior to the beginning of experimental work. 
The results so far place us still in a middle ground. "Transfer'* 
is an accepted experimental fact, but as to the extent to which 
training transfers and the most favorable conditions for its trans- 
fer specialists are not always agreed. . . . Thus the studies 
indicate that the law of learning has to be made a conscious 
matter of ideation in order to insure any considerable amount of 
transferred improvement. 

Our whole complaint against the doctrine of formal 
discipline is that it does not attempt to get results 
by conscious ideation. It expects them to grow 
where they have not been planted. If they grow in 
reliable quantity only from conscious ideation, the 
superstition that they come of themselves as happy 
by-products is banished, and the fight for specific 
instruction is won. 

The difference between Dr. Rugg's "not yet 
proven," Dr. Coover's "proven," Mr. Moore's 
"proven beyond a question," Professor Spearman's 
and Dr. Sleight's "disproven," Professor Dear- 
born's "not proven," and the many other conflicting 
utterances of the experimentalists upon this doctrine 
have put a cloud upon its title, which no amount of 
special pleading can remove. When we attempt to 



126 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

apply these highly discordant results in the selection 
of studies and ways of teaching, we can make nothing 
out of them. They are a counsel of confusion. 
Dr. Coover's summary of experimental results does 
not agree with Dr. Rugg's and does not seem to be 
entirely warranted by the experiments which he 
recounts. But let us take it as though it were : 
"Under experimental conditions the * general' effect 
usually ranged in amount from one fourth to three 
fourths of the gain made in specific practice." 
Now what educational application can one make out 
of that.f^ Is there anything in it which rehabilitates 
the doctrine of formal discipline ? Does that tell us 
to study mathematics for formal disciplinary reasons 
or not? Does it indicate that mathematics is 
superior to science, history or literature in contribut- 
ing "general effect".'^ How general is the "general 
effect" which the experiments show? Does the 
experimenter who has had the special training become 
better in all respects or only in his ability to repeat 
and reapply the special lesson which he has learned ? 
He can do kindred work or perform related activities 
better, he is not trained generally, but very partic- 
ularly still. The fact that "transfer" is explained 
by those who attempt to explain it as due to common 
elements, middle terms, identity in method, content 
or aim, indicates that what is transferred is the specific 
lesson or part of the specific lesson which has been 
learned. If that lesson is the carrier, it must be kept 
in the focus of attention. The general grows out of 
the specific, but the specific must be learned before 
there can be a general. There are other reasons for 



MATHEMATICS AND FORMAL DISCIPLINE 127 

emphasizing the preponderant importance of specific 
training. On Dr. Coover's own showing it always 
exceeds the "general effect" by from three-fourths 
to one-fourth. Now, since "general effect" is only 
slightly generalized specific effect, why not arrange 
to get the benefit of both together rather than reject 
the one to get the other ? To make the general effect 
our object when we could have both is surely un- 
economical. 

The experiments do not show that one study is 
better than another in producing "general" effects. 
They offer as much comfort to one study as another. 
In this respect they do not establish the doctrine of 
disciplinary studies. They break it down. 

Professor Spearman and Dr. Sleight can not be 
read out of court so cavalierly. As for the burden of 
proof it is still where it always has been — on the side 
making an assertion. The contention that partic- 
ular studies have special and greatly to be preferred 
formal disciplinary effects has not been proven. 

Since it is well to go to the experts for reasons for 
studying a subject, I should like to repeat two 
very important statements made since the beginning 
of the war by mathematicians. "In speaking of 
the significance of mathematics," says the retiring 
president of the Mathematical Association of Amer- 
ica, Professor E. N. Hendrick, "I understand that 
we mean not at all the baser material advantage 
to the individual student, not at all a narrow utili- 
tarianism, but rather a comprehensive grasp of the 
usefulness of mathematics to society as a whole, to 
science, to engineering, to the nation. Any narrower 



128 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

view would be unworthy of us ; any narrower 
demand by educators means a degraded view of the 
purposes of education in a democracy." And the 
other from the presidential address to the Mathe- 
matical Association of Great Britain, January, 1916, 
by Professor A. N. Whitehead: "But what is the 
point of teaching a child to solve a quadratic equa- 
tion ? There is a traditional answer to this question. 
It runs thus : The mind is an instrument, you first 
sharpen it and then use it. The acquisition of the 
power of solving a quadratic equation is part of the 
process of sharpening the mind. Now there is just 
enough truth in this answer to have made it live 
through the ages. But for all its half truth it em- 
bodies a radical error which bids fair to stifle the 
genius of the modern world. . . . Whoever was the 
originator, there can be no doubt of the authority 
which it has acquired by the continuous approval 
which it has received from eminent persons. But 
whatever its weight of authority, whatever the high 
approval which it can quote, I have no hesitation 
in denouncing it as one of the most fatal, erroneous 
and dangerous conceptions ever introduced into 
education." 



DOES THE STUDY OF MATHEMATICS 
TRAIN THE MIND SPECIFICALLY OR 
UNIVERSALLY? A REPLY TO A 
REPLY 1 

My discussion was what it professed to be, not a 
treatise, not an encyclopedic article, not even an 
attempt to sum up both sides of a vast controversy, 
but an effort to state in forty minutes the point of view 
that the study of mathematics is specific to a company. 
The Association of Teachers of Mathematics in 
New England, almost all of whom were well indoc- 
trinated upholders of the contrary theory. I put 
into my argument what seemed to me to be pertinent 
to the subject and the occasion. Professor Moritz 
would doubtless have treated the subject quite 
differently, but he must not arraign me because I 
do not attach to the arguments and citations which 
he would have used the value he attaches to them. I 
shall attempt to meet his points in the order in which 
he makes them. 

That education is, or at least aims to be, a conscious 
process and a purposive undertaking, he seems to 
doubt, though I am not clear as to what alternative 
is in his mind. To my contention that studying a 
subject because we believe that we owe it to that 

1 Robert E. Moritz, "Does the Study of Mathematics Train the Mind 
Specifically or Universally ? A Reply," School and Society, April 27, 1918. 
K 129 



130 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

subject to pay it that debt of honor, reverence, 
obeisance, or worship is a form of idolatry which 
annually entails a heavy sacrifice of young lives, he 
replies that "the only educator who is on record for 
having sacrificed a whole hecatomb of lives is 
Pythagoras. ..." The taking of lives in the name 
of subjects is not uncommon, though those who do 
it do not allow it to be recorded. To the statement 
that science for the sake of science, literature for 
the sake of literature, knowledge for the sake of 
knowledge and art for art's sake are peculiarly in- 
human beliefs he enters a vehement protest. I think 
that is due to a seeming rather than a real difference 
in fundamental philosophy; though I am not sure, 
for in these days when millions offer themselves as 
sacrifices to that supermetaphysical state which does 
not even claim to exist for their or any man's good, 
but rather that they exist for it, it is possible that 
some men still believe that knowledge, art, science, 
literature, philosophy and mathematics do not exist 
for man's sake but like that state for their own. 
If any one will take the trouble to think the matter 
through, he will not stop in that belief. Un- 
fortunately for Professor Moritz's argument, the 
illustrations which he offers to support it refute it. 
You can not prove that knowledge exists for its own 
sake by showing that it has ultimately been used. 
That makes it instrumental. In the New Testament 
the believers are promised a knowledge of the truth 
"and the truth shall make you free." That is its 
function. If it does not make itself indispensable by 
serving in some capacity, it is certain to be neglected 



THE STUDY OF MATHEMATICS 131 

and forgotten as so many so-called discoveries, 
revelations and systems of knowledge have been, 
for the law of survival weeds out mental products 
just as it weeds out organisms. 

But Professor Moritz's meaning may be that 
though knowledge does not exist for the sake of 
knowledge, the investigator in order to give himself 
unreservedly to investigation must act somewhat 
in that spirit. That, I think, is sound. Though the 
sole purpose of knowledge is to minister to human 
need, investigation must run ahead of human need 
and lay up a stock of knowledge in anticipation of 
society's future requirements. If the investigator 
attempts too exactly to determine the utility of his 
discovery before he has made it, he will desert his 
function of investigating to busy himself with passing 
a final judgment upon the value of the facts which he 
proposes to examine, which is the function of society 
and one which it can perform only when he has done 
his work of putting the facts which he has discovered 
at its command. It enjoins him to go forth and 
make discovery as though discovery was an end in 
itself, well knowing that what he does is only half 
the story, for it reserves to itself the right to pass 
upon the value of all that he offers it and to reject 
whatever parts of his contribution do not in some 
way serve it. That is, its command to him to 
extend the boundaries of knowledge for the sake of 
knowledge is methodological, and not at all a final 
philosophy. 

But is that principle of method to be applied in 
schools where what is attempted is the quite different 



132 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

task of bringing the consciousness of the young to an 
appreciation of the discoveries which the race has 
made and whose value it has proven by its need? 
Surely the lessons which are taught must not be 
lessons for the sake of lessons, and if we are at all 
serious, they will be carefully chosen because of 
their unmistakable value. We may quarrel about 
what is valuable, but how can we possibly differ 
about it being value, and nothing but value, that 
we seek for them ? 

As to there being "only three purposes, if there 
were more the writer would have discovered 
them," I think Professor Moritz credits me with 
less humility than I try to bring to the discussion 
of these matters. 

This proposition that the mind needs no improving, that in 
fact it can not be improved, is so obvious to the writer that he 
considers any discussion of it a mere waste of time. 

I fear I have not made my meaning plain. There 
is a room in the Harvard Club in Boston which is set 
apart for the use of graduates of the medical school, 
and over the fireplace in that room is an inscription 
which sums up in a sentence the philosophy of the 
medical profession. It reads : 

We dress the wound, God heals it. 

If the physician can not heal wounds, can the 
teacher make over minds, repair them, add cubits 
to their stature, build additions to them, sharpen 
them, improve them, perfect them? We may say 
that he is engaged in doing that, just as we sometimes 
say that the gardener makes the plant grow, but if 



THE STUDY OF MATHEMATICS 133 

we are trying to think exactly, and to speak exactly, 
we will not say that or think that. As for perfect- 
ing the faculties of the mind, it is plain that if there 
are no faculties, they can not be perfected. 

Professor Moritz has it that I "promised to point 
out that there have been almost or quite as many 
competent critics of this doctrine as upholders of it," 
and that as a matter of fact I do neither, citing but 
one authority for it ; namely. Professor C. J. Keyser, 
and "almost or quite as many" ; namely. Sir William 
Hamilton, as opposing it. Promised is not the word ; 
stated or pointed out, in the sense of calling attention 
to the fact, is. My critic's method of counting, by 
which Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, d'Alembert, Des- 
cartes and Blaise Pascal become ^^one authority . . . 
namely, Sir William Hamilton," is, to say the least, 
confusing. To my non-mathematical mind these 
names represented several important thinkers with 
not a little knowledge of mathematics and some 
ability to tell about its rightful claims. I fear I have 
not sufficiently "observed the unit." I can, however, 
assure him that when Professor Keyser declared that 
Sir William Hamilton distorted "the express and 
unmistakable meaning" of d'Alembert, Blaise Pascal 
and Descartes," even to the extent of complete inver- 
sion," Hamilton did not misquote their words in 
these passages. If they did not say what they meant, 
that statement may be true, but if they were able 
to put their thoughts into language, that statement 
needs revision. Why is it that Sir William 
Hamilton's paper causes such spasmodic wrigglings 
in certain quarters even to-day? 



134 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

He even fails to detect the fine irony contained in Professor 
Young's remark. 

The remark referred to is the second statement 
in the following quotation. Let the reader detect 
the irony if he can. 

The reading of his paper (Sir William Hamilton's) is instructive 
to the teacher of mathematics, as are all thoughtful judgments of 
the subject or any of its phases, from those who look at it from a 
different viewpoint. It is a pity more such criticisms are not 
made. Carefully studied, Sir William Hamilton's paper shows 
that much progress has been made in the pedagogy of mathe- 
matics since his time, and should serve to spur on or to encourage 
the teacher in his efforts often enough quite arduous, to keep the 
pupil at work evolving his own mathematics.^ 

"It seems incredible," says Professor Moritz, 
"that any writer who values his reputation should 
play up arguments published over eighty years ago, 
and which were answered in detail by one of the 
world's greatest thinkers, without even making 
mention of that fact." Ah! but were they answered 
in detail? Instead of destroying Hamilton's case 
did not Mill indeed proceed to make a stronger case 
than Hamilton had made.^^ Every pragmatist is 
profoundly indebted to John Stuart Mill for light 
and leading in the very fundamentals of belief. The 
twenty- seventh chapter of his "Examination of Sir 
William Hamilton's Philosophy" is particularly dear 
to them, but not for the reasons for which Professor 
Moritz values it. Indeed, as a reply to Sir William 
Hamilton, it is singularly dogmatic and ineffective. 
Its great author does not seem at all times to know 
just what Hamilton really says, and in the end he 

1 Young, "The Teaching of Mathematics," p. 39. 



THE STUDY OF MATHEMATICS 135 

out-Hamiltons Hamilton in his distrust of mathe- 
matics. His point that Hamilton was no mathe- 
matician and therefore not qualified to discuss the 
question would be more telling if the question were a 
mathematical one. 

What does Mill really claim for the study of mathe- 
matics .^^ To Hamilton's contention that mathe- 
matics "does not teach us either by theory or 
practice to estimate probabilities," his reply is : 

Did any mathematician or eulogist of mathematics ever pre- 
tend that it did ? 

Inasmuch as abstract science in general and mathematics in 
particular afford no practice in the estimation of conflicting 
probabilities, which is the kind of sagacity most required in the 
conduct of practical affairs, it follows that when made so exclusive 
an occupation as to prevent the mind from obtaining enough of 
this necessary practice in other ways, it does worse than not 
cultivate the faculty — it prevents it from being acquired, and 
pro tanto unfits the person for the general business of life. 

If Mill is to be our authority, that passage alone, 
if followed, would free many, perhaps most, high- 
school pupils from the burden of present-day mathe- 
matical requirements. But Mill is more confident, 
perhaps too confident, that the subject has other 
values. 

Let us be assured that for the formation of a well-trained in- 
tellect it is no slight recommendation of a study that it is the 
means by which the mind is earliest and most easily brought to 
maintain within itself a standard of complete proof. 

But those students of whom Herbert Spencer 
doubted "if one boy in five hundred ever heard the 
explanation of a rule of arithmetic or knows his 
Euclid otherwise than by rote" did not acquire from 



136 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

their study a standard of complete proof; that 
result does not come as a by-product of studying 
algebra or geometry for a certain time. Not the 
mere manipulation of algebraic and geometrical facts 
and processes, but specific lessons which have for 
their purpose the development of the notion of 
what mathematical proof is and what its demands 
and requirements are, will if they are successful, train 
the mind to familiarity with such standards. Only 
the teacher who believes in miracles will hope to 
reap such results where he has not sown. And inas- 
much as proof is one thing in geometry and a very 
different thing in history or science or ethics, both 
the teacher and the student must remember that it is 
not a standard of proof but a standard of mathe- 
matical proof which they are elaborating. Mill him- 
self shall prove that in a moment. 

Another claim for mathematical studies which Mill 
makes is that they habituate the student to precision. 
To precision in all things or to precision in mathe- 
matics.^ Any one who has spent his life in dealing 
with students knows that precision is a rare trait 
both before and after they have taken mathematics 
courses. There is no denying that that ideal may 
be developed in the mathematics class and required 
there and may even be generalized to reach out and 
apply to operations other than those which are per- 
formed there, but it is only the teacher who con- 
sciously teaches that lesson who is likely to establish 
that ideal. Instruction in it, too, must be specific or 
it will not betray its existence very commonly even 
in the mathematics classroom. 



THE STUDY OF MATHEMATICS 137 

Neither is it a small advantage of mathematical studies, even 
in their poorest and most meager form, that they at least 
habituate the mind to resolve a train of reasoning into steps and 
make sure of each step before advancing to another. 

Here again Mill is talking of what mathematics 
when taught in a certain purposive way may accom- 
plish rather than what mere consorting with the 
subject does accomplish for the student. It is not 
the subject but a certain specific attack upon the 
subject which will bring results of that nature. 
The problem method, for example, has been employed 
for centuries in the teaching and studying of mathe- 
matics but it has not been applied to other subjects 
until very recently, though it could have been applied 
most profitably to them. Our contention is that 
these lessons are not by-products of the ordinary 
teaching of mathematics, but when they are conse- 
quences of that subject, it is because they have been 
consciously made to take their places as essential 
parts of the content which is taught and studied in 
that subject. 

' Since Professor Moritz has appealed to Mill, to 
Mill he must go, though he will regret having 
called upon him for judgment when he finds out what 
his judgment is. Thus far his champion, though 
rather inconclusive, has stood beside him ; but now 
their ways part completely, for Mill declares that 
Sir William Hamilton has indeed made 

a far less powerful attack upon the tendencies of mathematical 
studies than could easily be made by one who understood the 
subject. He has in fact missed the most considerable of the 
evil effects to the production of which those studies have con- 



138 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

tributed ; and has thrown no light on the intellectual shortcomings 
of the common run of mathematicians so singularly displayed in 
their wretched treatment of the generalities of their own 
science. . . . 

"The one really grave charge which rests on the 
mathematical spirit, " according to Mill, is that 

it leads men to place their ideal of Science in deriving all knowl- 
edge from a small number of axiomatic premises, accepted as 
self-evident and taken for immediate intuitions of reason. This 
is what Descartes attempted to do and inculcated as the thing 
to be done; and as he shares with only one other name the 
honor of having given his impress to the whole character of the 
modem speculative movement, the consequences of his error 
have been most calamitous. . . . All reflecting persons in 
England and many in France perceive that the chief infirmities 
of French thinking arise from its geometrical spirit. ... If 
this be the case even in France, it is still worse in Germany, the 
whole of whose speculative philosophy is an emanation from Des- 
cartes, and to most of whose thinkers the Baconian point of view is 
still below the horizon. Through Spinoza, who gave to his system 
the very forms as well as the entire spirit of geometry ; through 
the mathematician Leibnitz, who reigned supreme over the 
German speculative mind for above a generation; with its 
spirit temporarily modified by the powerful intellectual in- 
dividuality oflKant, but flying back after him to its uncorrected 
tendencies, the geometrical spirit went on from bad to worse, 
until in Schelling and Hegel the laws even of physical nature were 
deduced by ratiocination from subjective deliverances of the 
mind. The whole of German philosophical speculation has run 
from the beginning in this wrong groove, and having only 
recently become aware of the fact is at present making con- 
vulsive efforts to get out of it. All these mistakes and this 
deplorable waste of time and intellectual power by some of the 
most gifted and cultivated portions of the human race are effects 
of the too unqualified predominance of the mental habits and 
tendencies engendered by elementary mathematics. 



THE STUDY OF MATHEMATICS 139 

If Mill had this to say at that time for the mental 
habits and tendencies engendered by elementary 
mathematics, what would he have said had he written 
that passage to-day in the midst of the full flowering 
of German philosophical ideas? Mathematics sets 
up a standard of proof, but in the minds in which it 
does that the effect is reprehensible. Mathematics 
habituates the student to precision, but if he seeks 
mathematical precision in non-mathematical fields, 
see what a mess he makes of it. Mathematics 
habituates the mind to resolve a train of reasoning 
into steps and make sure of each step before it 
advances to another, but the reasoning must be 
mathematical before the mathematical linkage will 
apply. The net result is that mathematical ideals 
and processes apply to mathematics and its imme- 
diate applications. Now if these notions in their un- 
restricted form are harmful in men, would they not be 
equally harmful in young men and in children if they 
indeed got them from their study of that subject? 
So we must add to our contention that they do not get 
such general ideas, but only specific ideas narrowly 
applied, the further conviction that it would be 
harmful if they did. 

I have spent many years upon Plato and nowhere 
do I find him upholding the by-product theory of 
education. He is far too good a thinker to do that. 
His whole emphasis from the good musician to the 
good guardian is that specific training alone will 
accomplish the result which is wanted. When he 
says that arithmetic makes one quicker he means 
merely that one who studies it as Plato intended 



140 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

gets a new notion of intelligence as a successful 
problem solver, a notion which makes him attack 
recognizedly similar problems more vigorously. Let 
me quote again his own words, which Professor 
Moritz, distracted by his statement "I have hardly 
ever known a mathematician who could reason," 
failed to read. 

When there is some contradiction always present and one is 
the reverse of one and involves the conception of plurality, then 
thought begins to be aroused within us and the soul, perplexed and 
wanting to arrive at a decision, asks: "What is unity itself?'* 
This is the way in which the study of the one has a power of 
drawing and converting the mind to the contemplation of true 
being. 

As true being is intelligence, the claim which is 
made is that these studies when rightly used lead to 
self-discovery. There is not the slightest need to 
quarrel about his theory of education, for Plato him- 
self has stated that it was specific in a most luminous 
and definite passage which reads : 

According to my view any one who would be good at any- 
thing must practice that thing from his youth upward both in 
sport and in earnest in its several branches ; for example, he who 
is to be a good builder, should play at building children's houses ; 
he who is to be a good husbandman, at tilling the ground ; and those 
who have the care of their education should provide them when 
young with mimic tools. They should learn beforehand the knowl- 
edge which they will afterwards require for their art. For example, 
the future carpenter should learn to measure or apply the line 
in play ; and the future warrior should learn riding or some other 
exercise, for amusement, and the teacher should endeavor to 
direct the children's inclinations and pleasures by the help of 
amusements to their final aim in life. The most important part 
of education is right training in the nursery. The soul of the 



THE STUDY OF MATHEMATICS 141 

child in his play should be guided to the love of that sort of 
excellence in which when he grows up to manhood he will have 
to be perfected. Do you agree with me thus far ? 

"Certainly." 

Then let us not leave the meaning of education ambiguous or 
ill dej&ned. At present w^hen we speak in terms of praise or 
blame about the bringing-up of each person, we call one man 
educated and another uneducated, although the uneducated 
man may be sometimes very well educated for the calling of a 
retail trader, or of a captain of a ship and the like. For we are 
not speaking of education in this narrower sense, but of that other 
education in virtue from youth upwards, which makes a man 
eagerly pursue the ideal perfection of citizenship, and teaches 
him how rightly to rule and how to obey. This is the only edu- 
cation which, upon our view, deserves the name ; that other sort 
of training which aims at the acquisition of wealth or bodily 
strength or mere cleverness apart from intelligence and justice 
is mean and illiberal and is not worthy to be called education at 
all. But let us not quarrel with one another about a word, pro- 
vided that the proposition which has just been granted hold good : 
to wit, that those who are rightly educated become good men. 
Neither must we cast a slur upon education, which is the first and 
fairest thing that the best of men can ever have, and which, 
though liable to take a wrong direction, is capable of reforma- 
tion, and this work of reformation is the great business of every 
man while he lives.^ 

As to Comte, I am unable to find a single passage 
which supports the by-product theory. My critic 
shall have all the comfort he can get from the long 
list of extracts he cites. To me the one thing which 
they state is that if one studies mathematics to good 
purpose, he will be able to use mathematics in the 
various applications of it which he masters. If 
Professor Moritz will take the trouble to read on 

1 " Laws,"^643-44. 



142 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

until he comes to Comte's chapter entitled "Final 
Estimate of the Positive Method," he will find much 
that does not agree with his interpretation. 
"Though the geometrical and mechanical point of 
view is universal . . . they can never, even in the 
simplest cases, obviate the necessity of a direct study 
of the subject; and that direct study must always 
be the preponderant one." Does Comte then believe 
that mathematics is a preferred study, or that it is 
only one among many? Does he believe in specific 
or in that vague thing called "general training.^" 

It is certain that astronomical, like physical discovery, has 
been much impeded by the intrusion of the geometers, who do 
not perceive in the one case any more than in the other, that the 
pursuit of any science is the work of students who understand 
the special destination of the instrument, logical or material, as 
well as its structure. 

The only really universal point of view is the human, or, speak- 
ing exactly, the social. 

The mathematicians may be incapable of estimating social 
researches, but sociologists are free from their blindness, and 
can never possibly underrate mathematical labors. 

A few years spent in pursuing one kind of studies, so simple 
as to be accessible to average ability, are the mathematical 
qualification ; but the result has been, in the most triumphant 
days of mathematical ambition, a supremacy more apparent than 
real, and wholly destitute amidst all its pretensions to scientific 
universality, of the practical reality which belongs to sociological 
ascendancy. 

The comparative method proper to biology, and the historical 
method proper to sociology are the two greatest logical creations, 
achieved in the face of extreme scientific difficulties : but the 
disgraceful ignorance of almost all geometers of these two trans- 
cendent methods of logical investigation shows that it was not 
mathematics that furnished the conception. ... 



THE STUDY OF MATHEMATICS 143 

As to the experiments which have been made and 
particularly as to those of them to which I referred, 
I think my critic goes much too fast also. He pro- 
fesses deep solicitude for the impartial weighing of 
scientific evidence, and in that I share, but one 
must carry out his pretensions. There is much 
magic in such a phrase as "the coefficient of corre- 
lation" and he uses it to the full. "Does not the 
writer know," he asks, "that Lewis's tests have been 
repeatedly discredited by other writers?" Such as 
they are they have not been discredited. What "the 
other writers" to whom he refers have done has been 
to take Lewis's data and to calculate coefficients of 
correlation for them. That translates his results into 
other language but does not change the results in 
the slightest. Lewis did not phrase them in that 
language, he simply described them. Their formula 
contains exactly what his description contained, but 
by their formula they imply a causative relation 
between one study and another, whereas in this case 
no such causative relation is either shown or implied 
by their coefficient of correlation, for no measure- 
ment was made at the beginning of the test and there 
is no proof whatever that the marks had any such 
causative relation to each other. If my critic means 
that Lewis's test is far from proving anything save 
that a large number of students who are good in 
mathematics are poor in law and vice versa, that is 
correct, but that is all I offered them as illustrating. 

For the thoroughness of Professor Rugg's study 
I have nothing but praise. As to the bearing of his 
results upon educational practice he is by no means so 



144 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

dogmatic as Professor Moritz is. This is the final 

paragraph in his book : ^ 

The possibility of one disciplinary outcome in a specific school 
subject, i.e., ability in the mental manipulation of spatial ele- 
ments, has been established in this investigation. The writer 
believes that formal school subjects find a large part of their 
disciplinary value in the developing of this ability to analyze 
the problem and to organize a method of procedure; to build 
up ideals, or to organize a method of attack. But it is undoubted 
that they also make habitual, or automatic, many specific 
constituents of the complex abilities that function in many com- 
plex situations. The successful habitualizing of these specific 
reactions is accentuated by the building up of a background of 
fundamental attitudes of orientation, or familiarity with the 
content of the situations to be met. It may be increased by the 
accompaniment of practice in extending the range of attention. 

Is this ability to analyze the problem and to 
organize a method of procedure general or specific? 
In the nature of the case, method must be specific 
to the matter to which it applies. It may be 
applicable far beyond the limits of "the specific 
school subject" in connection with which it is taught, 
but it can not be unlimited unless it be too abstract 
to connect up with any subject matter in particular. 
The "specific constituents" of the complex abilities 
which they — the so-called disciplinary studies — 
make habitual were, it will be noted, specific con- 
stituents. That is, certain specific methods, ideals 
and habits were learned and were applied beyond the 
particular subject matter in connection with which 
they were expressly taught. In another connection 
Professor Rugg asks : 

1 " The Experimental Determination of Mental Discipline in School 
Studies," by H. O. Rugg; Warwick & York, 1916. 



THE STUDY OF MATHEMATICS 145 

But having satisfied ourselves that the effect of training did 
spread to abilities not specifically trained by the training series 
[I think he means by "abilities" here, not procedures or acts, but 
their application to a new subject matter] can we go further and 
offer any definite information as to the exact range of this spread 
of improvement? Can we say, for example, that with the 
average student the training carried over one-half or four- 
tenths as efficiently into quasi-geometrical fields as it did into 
fields dealing with strictly geometrical elements? Or that it 
carried over one-third or one-fourth as efficiently with non-geo- 
metrical elements as with strictly geometrical elements? Ob- 
viously we can not. In order to do so we should require a 
definite measure of the adequacy of each test as a measure of the 
specific abilities tested. . . . To know that, however, would 
require the solution of a problem in the design of mental tests, 
and in the calibration of mental tests, which in itself would be 
very formidable and one whose solution has not been deemed 
possible as a preliminary step in the conduct of this study. 

Here again Professor Moritz employs the charm 
of the coeflScient of correlation to produce the state 
of mind which he desires. 

For mathematics and descriptive geometry it was found to 
be 0.70; for mathematics and foreign languages 0.50; for 
mathematics and English 0.40. . . . Now, as is well known, 
correlation coefficients ranging above 0.40 indicate a high degree 
of correlation and create a strong presumption in favor of some 
causal relation between the efficiencies compared. 

Professor Rugg, following Rietz, to whom Moritz 
appeals, puts it differently : 

The author's practice is to regard correlation as *' negligible" 
or "indifferent" when r is less than .15 or .20; as being present, 
but "low" when r is .15 or .20 to .35 or .40; as being "marked" 
from .40 to .50 or .60 ; and as being " high " with values of r above 
.50 or .60. 



146 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

That, I suppose, is a minor difference, but a mathe- 
matician should be exact. 

Now while the absence of correlation proves the 
absence of "transfer," the presence of even a "high" 
correlation does not prove that it was due to transfer ; 
while it creates a presumption, the burden of proving 
that it was due to transfer rests upon those who make 
the contention. To make their case they must 
establish the fact that they have employed a definite 
measure of the adequacy of each test, which is 
exactly what Professor Rugg says has not been 
done. The nature of the lessons given must be 
examined to find out whether their effects were 
specific or general. Again, if only a high degree of 
correlation establishes a strong presumption in 
favor of some causal relation between the efficiencies 
compared, that presumption is established only in 
the case of mathematics and descriptive geometry, 
but not in the case of mathematics and foreign lan- 
guages or in the case of mathematics and English. 

Let that be as it may. There are many other 
experimental studies which I did not attempt to 
report, choosing these merely because they had to do 
with mathematics. Taken together or distributively 
they seem to assist materially in establishing the 
fact that we can not any longer choose studies or 
put our confidence in studies or require students to 
take studies on the ground of their formal disciplinary 
value. The tests one and all confirm that; some- 
thing is transferred sometimes and in some degree, 
but it is too meager and uncertain to warrant any 
one in pursuing the subject for its sake alone. The 



THE STUDY OF MATHEMATICS 147 

question of the existence of "transfer" and the 
amount of the "transfer" has thus become a question 
for mathematical psychology. In its present form 
it has no bearing on educational procedure. Why ? 
Because the tests themselves show quite conclusively, 
since the coefficient of correlation in one case is .70 
between mathematics and descriptive geometry and 
.50 between mathematics and foreign languages and 
only .40 between mathematics and English, and in 
every case takes that varying form, that what we 
are dealing with is not general powers which should, 
if they were general, operate in the same general way 
without regard to differences in subject matter, but 
specific effects of training which have no constant 
value but are applicable to the contexts to which 
they belong, but not beyond them. 

Even if all the experiments should with one voice 
show a uniform coefficient of correlation of .90 
between mathematics and every other study in the 
curriculum, not until it is clearly proven that the 
study of mathematics is the only study which pro- 
duces that result can it claim the by-product value 
which would warrant us in teaching it as formal 
discipline while the others were taught only for their 
specific utilities. Perhaps they, too, through their 
representative character affect our work in matters 
which are not mentioned in the textbooks. If they 
do not, we had better stop teaching them. 

Not until the study of mathematics can show a 
correlation coefficient of 1 with other studies can 
that study claim the time and the energy which we 
need for those other studies on the score that pursuit 



148 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

of it is proxy for pursuit of them. If one has need 
for mathematics, and most do, he must study the 
mathematics which he needs. But if he has need for 
French shall he, for the sake of its formal discipline, 
take a course in mathematics which he does not need 
because the coefficient of correlation between mathe- 
matics and foreign languages has been found to be 
.50, or shall he take a course in French? Assume 
that my situation is such that I want to, and must, 
master Arabic, but have no specific need for Hebrew. 
Assume further that the coefficient of correlation 
between Hebrew and Arabic has been found to be 
.70. Shall I spend my time on the Hebrew that 
I do not need or shall I attack the Arabic at once? 
That is the question. If I attack it at once, I may 
be able to master as much Arabic as Hebrew in the 
time that I should be compelled to devote to Hebrew. 
Is it not the same with other studies ? There are a 
number of them that we need and need desperately 
and have all too little time for. Shall we not devote 
ourselves to them? 

Professor Moritz agrees that mathematics does not 
train the mind universally; from him that is a large 
concession. He holds that it does more than train 
the mind specifically and is eager to know how much 
more than that it does. That, he says, is an open 
question. But does he propose to go on forcing 
students to take mathematics for its formal dis- 
ciplinary effects until that question is answered, or 
is he willing to declare a holiday in which he shall no 
more make that poor, weak and broken doctrine do 
any labor or perform any work until such time as it 



THE STUDY OF MATHEMATICS 149 

may escape from the physicians and surgeons who 
are engaged in diagnosing its condition, and be re- 
stored to us with the necessary amputations made ? 
I suspect that he will, like Germany, go on arming, 
though it is better to give up a procedure whose issue 
is so uncertain for a workable expectation whose 
outcome is assured. 

There is another way. It emphasizes directness 
and definiteness of attack. The eminent jurist who 
has just published "The Voice of Lincoln" ^ writes : 

During the past year's study of Lincoln I have improved my 
efficiency in handling a legal question or a governmental problem 
more than one hundred per cent by following the Lincoln 
method. This method he gives us in his own words. It is the 
most important declaration to my mind (though only an inter- 
view) that Lincoln ever made that can be used by the American 
student. 

First. To hunt for an idea until I caught it. 
Second. To repeat it over and over again. 
Third. To put it into language plain enough for any boy 

I knew to comprehend. 
Fourth. Bound it on the north, bound it on the south, bound 

it on the east, bound it on the west. 
As we put the Kaiser out of our schools, I am in favor of putting 

Lincoln in. 

That is specific education. It is hunting for 
something that one wants to find. That something 
must be a definite something, not a target of such 
low visibility as a general effect, before it can be 
hunted for. Its object, as Plato has phrased it for 
all time, is teaching the young the knowledge which 
they will afterward require for their art. As to 

* "The Voice of Lincoln," by P. M. Wanamaker, Scribner's, New 
York. 



150 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

how that knowledge can best be developed, the world 
has been making a colossal experiment in the last 
three years, and it finds that quick, purposive, and 
intensive training will produce the trained trench 
fighter, the trained artillery man, the trained flying 
man, the trained mechanic, the trained instructor 
or the trained officer within a period of from three 
to nine months. These results are obtained through 
specific education. Every one knows the objective. 
The officers tell the men that in their work there are 
no military secrets. Whenever lessons are set or 
movements are undertaken, the men are let into the 
plan and from the beginning know what it is they 
are trying to do as well as their leaders. Each one is 
led by his own intelligence. Every undertaking is 
a target which he first sees and then aims at. Of 
course, he can accomplish something then. 

The heaviest count against the doctrine of formal 
discipline is that it makes such an intelligent pro- 
ceeding impossible, it does not employ the psychology 
of attention, it substitutes obscurantism for clearly 
conceived purposes, it counsels blindness and relies 
upon indefinite application to produce results. 
Never again can it function as a philosophy of 
education in a world which has learned to see and 
then to attack, to first take aim and then to shoot, 
and to work by clearly understood objectives in all 
that it undertakes. 

Of the doctrine that the mind is an instrument 
which must be sharpened before it is used and that 
mathematics is the grindstone upon which to sharpen 
it, the eminent British mathematician, Professor 



THE STUDY OF MATHEMATICS 151 

A. N. Whitehead, declares that there is just enough 
truth in it to have made it live through the ages. 

But for all its half truth it embodies a radical error which bids 
fair to stifle the genius of the modern world. . . . Whoever 
was the originator, there can be no doubt of the authority which 
it has acquired by the continuous approval which it has received 
from eminent persons. But whatever its weight of authority, 
whatever the high approval which it can quote, I have no hesi- 
tation in denouncing it as one of the most fatal, erroneous and 
dangerous conceptions ever introduced into education. 

That qualification of the doctrine of formal dis- 
cipline is sound, for the presence of that doctrine 
in the mind of the teacher robs the lesson of the 
purposiveness and energy of specific endeavor. It 
takes away definiteness of striving and reduces 
expectation to a vague confidence that somehow 
the result will come no matter what is done nor how. 
It substitutes a superstitious routine for direct 
attack and leaves the student wearied, confused, 
disheartened, making of education a treadmill in- 
stead of an inspiration, a destroyer of, instead of a 
minister to, souls. 



FORMAL DISCIPLINE AND THE TEACH- 
ING OF LITERATURE 1 

Matthew Arnold speaks of having for more 
than twenty years gotten his living by inspecting 
schools for the people and of having seen as he went 
in and out of them that "the power of letters never 
reaches them at all." Yet he never lost the con- 
viction that **to know the best that has been thought 
and said in the world" is the chief duty of man. For 
such a knowledge, system in our reading is necessary, 
he declared. Without system reading is idling. 

Culture implies reading, but reading with a purpose to guide it. 
and with system. He does a good work who does anything to 
help this ; indeed it is the one essential service now to be rendered 
to education. 

Year by year the conviction grows that the thing 
which makes a given form of activity educative and 
distinguishes it from acts which pass by that name, 
but which are not in the slightest degree helpful, is 
its purpose. Without purpose clearly conceived and 
definitely apprehended teaching and learning are 
both impossible. Unless one shoots at a target he 
does not really learn to shoot but is engaged instead 
merely in making a noise with the gun. In recent days 
we have been learning to look upon the difficulties 

^An address before the New England Association of Teachers of 
English, Boston, March 17, 1917. 

152 



FORMAL DISCIPLINE AND LITERATURE 153 

which young people have in getting an education and 
their remarkable lack of interest in either the whole 
or in certain parts of that process, and the aimless 
dreaminess which they show and the stupidity which 
they exhibit as due to our habit of setting up targets 
of low visibility for them rather than to any lack 
of mental energy or moral vigor on their part. We 
begin to see quite clearly that in so far as we have 
failed to invite them to keenly purposeful activity, we 
have been guilty of habituating them to slothful 
indifference, purposeless work, aimless achieving and 
disorganizing and spiritless effort. Under such tui- 
tion they do not learn to use their minds but rather 
to misuse them. The effort to make education 
purposeful is therefore nothing short of an attempt 
to save souls. It seeks to substitute for the letter 
which deadens, the spirit which augments life. It 
opposes to routinary lessons whose objective no one 
comprehends, lessons whose aim is so specific that 
every student will feel the challenge to show his 
ability and perfect his skill in them. Such teaching 
will not turn out washed-out, confused and in- 
articulate-minded graduates. Instead it will say to 
the student from his first day to his last in school : 
"You are here to learn to do certain things which 
the race has found that it can not live without doing. 
Every lesson has a specific aim, which you are first 
to see and then if possible to accomplish. The ques- 
tion for you at all stages of your course is. Can you 
do these socially necessary things?" Such a recon- 
struction of our purposes as will permit the student 
to become a conscious developer of indispensable skill 



154 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

in the several human arts which are the basic tools 
of life nowadays is the reform which is now on foot 
in education. 

There are many kinds of warrant for this effort. 
Ours is the scientific age and scientific method has 
approved itself as perhaps the most valuable tool 
which the race possesses. Science is not aimless 
groping. Its first step is not the accumulating of 
facts. Francis Bacon said it was, but none of the 
great discoverers has been able to work that way. 
The scientist begins with a problem, his finding is 
due to a purpose. Learning for him is not the ac- 
cumulation of facts but the purposeful accumula- 
tion of facts. 

There is a very significant passage in the last writ- 
ten utterance of Professor Munsterberg. It reads : 

When the telegram of the Fatherland arrived, asking for a 
holiday greeting as a contribution to the Christmas number, I 
was sitting in my psychological laboratory with a group of 
students engaged in a complicated psychological research. We 
were just experimenting on some subtle functions of the human 
memory, studying the conditions under which man remembers 
and forgets. Some of the results were very queer. We found 
that the mind does not lose its memory ideas in a mechanical way, 
but that everything depends upon purposes ; ideas which are 
gathered with a certain aim quickly fade away when the motive 
is no longer effective. 

Psychologists tell us that a problem or purpose 
persists in its influence, directing and systematizing 
our mental behavior for a long time. By its aid we 
see what would otherwise pass unnoted, associa- 
tive tendencies are aroused and *'the sentiment of 
the end" leads to logical thought. There is in all 



FORMAL DISCIPLINE AND LITERATURE 155 

working to attain purposes a far keener consciousness 
of the self than in less definite labor, an "I really 
will" state rather than an "I will" condition of mind 
being set up by the challenge of the problem.^ 

The whole modern movement for efficiency may be 
regarded as an effort to define the task which the 
worker seeks to perform. That, at any rate, is the 
first step in its better performance. When we know 
quite clearly what is to be done, the means of doing 
it will disclose themselves much more unequivocally 
than when we have only a vague notion of what it 
is we are undertaking. 

All this applies just as directly to studying as it 
does to carrying pig iron. To be effective it must be 
definitely purposeful, it must call forth the activity 
of the student by offering a definite problem to be 
worked out by his searching, selecting and inter- 
preting. It must tax his ability to organize its 
matter and allow him opportunities to perform on 
his own responsibility the several acts upon the 
subject which occupies him that the race finds it 
necessary to perform when it uses that subject. 
When he learns to swim, he must do so by swimming. 
When he studies carpentry, he must do the things 
which a carpenter does. When he studies chemistry, 
he must perform the processes which a chemist em- 
ploys. When he studies geology, he must himself 
geologize. When he pursues psychology, his purpose 
and method must be to psychologize, and when he 
studies literature, his sole aim is to learn to use it. 

^See the Chapter on The Problem or Purpose in "Movement and 
Mental Imagery," by Margaret Floy Washburn, Houghton Mifflin Co. 



156 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

This point of view that we pursue studies for their 
definite and clearly comprehended utilities, requires 
us to abandon at least two other attitudes toward 
them. It seeks to abolish the distinction which Aris- 
totle made between theoretical and practical knowl- 
edge, when he divided knowing into two kinds — 
knowing for the sake of knowing — that is knowing 
wholly unmixed with volition — and knowing for 
the sake of doing. Knowing for the sake of knowing 
is the disinterested contemplation of that which is 
for no other reason than simply to know it. Knowing 
for the sake of doing has for its object a human 
interference with the course of events, controlling 
the environment by reacting to it in ways serviceable 
to ourselves, making things come our way or if not 
that, anticipating their way and keeping out of their 
path when they menace us. Such a separation of 
intellect from volition as Aristotle made in distin- 
guishing these two kinds of knowing finds little to 
support it in modern psychology. The nervous 
system is an action system rather than a device for the 
production of knowledge. The sensory nerves run 
into motor nerves ; the brain is a switchboard whose 
function it is to make appropriate connections. 

Perhaps no justification of literature is commoner 
than that it exists for its own sake. We are told 
over and over again that we must study it just be- 
cause it is literature just as we are told that we must 
study science for the sake of science, art for the sake 
of art, knowledge for the sake of knowledge. I 
have heard these statements and their several 
variants as often as one is apt to who spends his 



FORMAL DISCIPLINE AND LITERATURE 157 

days in college work, but I confess that no single 
glimmer of their meaning has ever been vouchsafed 
to me. I am utterly at a loss to understand why 
they have such a consolatory effect upon so many 
otherwise intelligent people. Science, literature and 
every other form of knowledge is man-made. We are 
forbidden to worship the creations of man's hands, 
for that is idolatry. Are not prostrations before 
the creations of his mind just as harmful? The 
practice of setting up images of wood and stone and 
of bowing down before them has ceased almost every- 
where, but the practice of hypostatizing ideas and 
worshiping them has not ceased, but is even to-day 
far more destructive of human life, it would seem, 
than all the other forms of idolatry that ever existed, 
for the German worship of that hyper-metaphysical 
entity, the self-existing state, is, as you know, a 
religion which calls for much human sacrifice. To 
hypostatize science or literature may not be as 
bloody a business, but it is very destructive of young 
lives. I am satisfied that the man who says that 
literature exists for its own sake has not taken the 
trouble to puzzle himself as to what that phrase may 
mean. He relies on words where he ought to employ 
thoughts, and students whom I know seem to have as 
much difficulty in working themselves into the state 
of devotion which this formula demands as I have. 
One very grave difficulty with literature worship is 
that it is polytheistic and its gods, like those of ancient 
Rome, are more numerous than their worshipers, so 
that a truly devout member of its cult must be un- 
ceasingly engaged in making prostrations and doing 



158 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

reverence or he will fail in his duty. I think you will 
agree with me that something very like a liturgical 
familiarity with authors and their works is prescribed 
in certain quarters. I went into a classroom a few 
days ago and was there just long enough to hear 
the question. What striking differences are there 
between "The Essay on Man" and "The Essay 
on Criticism" .f^ addressed to a class of young 
people whose members had read neither of those 
productions. 

It is, I believe, a far more wholesome view and al- 
together more helpful to the young that literature 
and art and science and every other form of knowl- 
edge exist for man's sake and came into being for no 
other reason than to serve him. WTien we take 
that view, we become able to select that which is 
helpful from that which is less helpful. We open 
the door to a reasonable procedure and can deter- 
mine what we shall teach and why we shall teach it 
and how we shall teach it in terms of human need 
and gain. 

The other doctrine which must be reckoned with 

before the teaching of literature or any other subject 

can become a purposive undertaking is the doctrine 

of formal or general discipline. There is a passage in 

Browning's "chat" which prefaces his translation 

of the Agamemnon of iEschylus in which he says : 

Learning Greek teaches Greek, and nothing else; certainly 
not common sense if that have failed to precede the teaching. 

That is the question, does teaching literature teach 
literature and nothing else or does teaching literature 
develop the faculties of the mind and improve our 



FORMAL DISCIPLINE AND LITERATURE 159 

thinking powers in general? In the old days the 
answer to this question was that learning is specific. 
No justification except its utility had to be found for 
teaching anything as long as its value was clearly 
evident. No one had to offer the argument that the 
study of Latin and Greek improves the faculties of 
the mind as long as Latin and Greek were the lan- 
guages of learning; but when men ceased to learn 
what they learned in them new reasons had to be 
assigned for continuing to study them, bad reasons 
to justify what they did from habit. It was about 
1750 that the realists, champions of new studies, 
the native language, the surrounding things of 
nature, man's life here and now, pressed the teachers 
of the classics so near to the wall, that they had in 
self-defense to extemporize a new justification for an 
outworn practice. The justification that they hit 
upon was that while the old studies were no longer 
directly useful they must be retained because they 
improve the faculties of the mind. This doctrine 
was made in Germany. Its antidote also came from 
Germany, when Herbart, the psychologist, made the 
discovery that there are no faculties in the mind, 
that each one of us has no such thing as a memory, 
but a hundred memories, no such thing as an im- 
agination, but ten thousand imaginings, no such 
thing as a faculty of reason, but many different acts 
of reasoning. 

If the psychologists abandoned the faculty psy- 
chology nearly a hundred years ago, why do teachers 
retain it still? The answer is not to the credit of 
teachers. Many investigations have been made in 



160 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

recent years to determine exactly what effect study- 
ing one thing has upon the doing of something else, 
like Professor James's effort to determine what help 
he got in memorizing one of Victor Hugo's poems 
by training himself through memorizing the first 
book of Milton's * ' Paradise Lost. ' ' He found that he 
memorized Victor Hugo more slowly after the train- 
ing than before it. Some experimenters have found 
that the test series is performed more successfully 
after practice training than before it and therefore 
claim that we do one thing better because of having 
learned to do another, that is, that skill or training is 
transferred from one context to another. The ques- 
tion is what is meant by the transfer of training ? If 
one learns to drive a Packard car he can also drive a 
Stanley steamer, that is, the skill in guiding the one 
car will be available in guiding the other, for thus 
far the two tasks are identical ; but if engine trouble 
develops in his Stanley steamer will his familiarity 
with the Packard motor tell him what to do or will he 
require a special knowledge of the steam car? I 
think you can see that as long as the novel situation 
is recognizably the same as the familiar one it requires 
the same reaction or nearly the same reaction on 
his part and that there is no transfer of skill, but 
only a repeating of acts already learned. But when 
the identical reaction will not do, a new method of 
handling the situation must be learned. If one 
tries to treat a steam engine as he has learned to 
handle a gas engine his knowledge of the gas engine 
will be an interfering rather than a facilitating factor. 
Knowing how to drive an electric automobile does 



FORMAL DISCIPLINE AND LITERATURE 161 

not enable one to drive a Packard or a Ford. Though 
there is much that is identical in the two tasks there 
is much that is different. 

Now strictly speaking we must not call the 
repeating of an act already learned a transfer of 
training. "In the literal sense/' says Professor 
Dewey, "any transfer is miraculous and impossible. 
But some activities are broad — they involve a 
coordination of many factors." "It would be, 
perhaps, nearer the truth," says Pyle, "to say that 
all habits are specific, but that some of the situations 
in which a habit is applicable are universal." If we 
take this view that any transfer is miraculous, but 
that specific forms of skill when once acquired can 
be repeated whenever the situation is not too novel 
to call them forth, we must abandon general dis- 
cipline altogether and devote ourselves to the 
humbler, but far more profitable, task of teaching 
those forms of specific skill which have clear and 
definite applications in life and to teaching them in 
connection with their applications. 

The validity of this position is, I think, confirmed 
by the fact that investigators commonly explain the 
so-called transfer which they find as due to the 
presence of identical elements in the training and the 
test series. And why is it that many experimenters 
upon this subject have failed to find in their results 
any warrant whatever for the doctrine of general 
discipline ? Such is clearly the conclusion of the last 
experiment which has been conducted in the division 
of education at Harvard, and such is Professor 
Spearman's conclusion from the elaborate experi- 

M 



162 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

ments which Dr. Sleight conducted. "The great 
assumption upon which education has rested for so 
many centuries," he writes, "is now at last rendered 
amenable to experimental corroboration — and it 
proves to be false." If further confirmation is 
needed, it may be had in abundance by any one who 
will take the trouble to puzzle out the questions : why 
is it that inventions are so rare ? and how can it be 
that studies will provide a general education for 
youth when they do nothing but turn adults into 
specialists ? It is asking far too much to insist that 
investigators of this subject should agree in either 
their findings or their conclusions from them. Their 
verdict can not be unanimous, but what they have 
already done puts a decided cloud upon the whole 
theory that we must learn to do one thing by doing 
another, and makes it impossible any longer to build 
a philosophy of education upon the uncertain ground 
of formal discipline. There are far better reasons 
for studying literature than for the sake of literature 
or for the sake of the general discipline derived there- 
by. There are specific reasons for studying it, and 
specific objects of a very definite sort to be attained 
by that study. What they are you who are quite 
familiar with it know far better than I do. 

You will recall that passage in Plato's "Republic" 
where he gives as his reason for objecting to some of 
Homer's stories about the gods and about the after 
life that "a young person can not judge what is 
allegorical and what is Hteral; anything that he 
receives into his mind at that age is likely to become 
indelible and unalterable; and therefore it is most 



FORMAL DISCIPLINE AND LITERATURE 163 

important that the tales which the young first hear 
should be models of virtuous thoughts." 

And we must beg Homer and the other poets not to be angry 
if we strike out these and similar passages, not because they are 
unpoetieal or unattractive to the popular ear, but because the 
greater the poetical charm of them, the less are they meet for 
the ears of boys and men who are meant to be free, and who 
should fear slavery more than death. ^ 

I can not but believe that no matter how long the 
world may last and poems and stories be written, 
this will be the last word as to their meaning. They 
are meant to be models of virtuous thoughts, meet for 
the ears of boys and men who are meant to be free 
and who should fear slavery more than death. 

The poet's power is a greater power than the 
scientist's or the historian's, yet he deals with the 
same subject matter that they handle and he 
addresses the same audience. All the products of 
human thinking are on their way to his mill. He is 
the master-revealer of their significance, a trans- 
former whose mission it is forever to compel the 
mind to the uncommonness of the commonplace. 
His it is to keep the Green Meadow where there are 
samples of lives. Xenophon makes Nicerates say : 

My father designing to make a virtuous man of me caused 
me to get every verse of Homer by heart .^ 

One may question the effectiveness of the method, 
but he can not well question the purpose which 
prompted the study of Homer. Strabo reports 
Eratosthenes as saying that the poet directs his whole 

1 Republic, 387. 2 Banquet HI . 



164 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

attention to the amusement of the mind, that is, that 
the mission of Hterature is to please. But in 
opposition to that idea Strabo declares that 

The ancients define poetry as a primitive philosophy guiding 
our life from infancy and pleasantly regulating our morals, our 
tastes and our actions. . . . On this account the earliest lessons 
which the citizens of Greece convey to their children are from 
the poets ; certainly not alone for the purpose of amusing their 
minds, but for their instruction.* 

We study literature to-day because the Greeks 
in their wisdom made it a permanent part of the 
course of study of all civilized people. And we 
study it for essentially the same reasons as they. 
They were wiser than we in making much of the 
reading of the poets and they were wiser than we in 
making much of the content of literature and little 
of its form. W^en the Romans came to study it, 
they applied the linguistic methods of the Alexan- 
drians to it. They had to master a foreign language 
and that together with their devotion to the art of 
making speeches made them acutely conscious about 
style and the formal aspects of the writings which 
they studied. When antiquity arose from the 
dead the first book on education which our renais- 
sance parents unearthed was Quintilian's "Institutes 
of Oratory" and out of that they made their edu- 
cation and ours too, for ours has come down from 
them. Our education is Roman, therefore, rather 
than Greek, and our practice of studying literature 
grammatically rather than interpretatively follows 
the defects of the Roman practice rather than the 

* Introduction to the Geography I-II-IH. 



FORMAL DISCIPLINE AND LITERATURE 165 

superior virtues of the Greek. There is little neces- 
sity for employing the Roman machinery of literary 
manipulation. There is much more to be said for 
the interpretative method of the Greeks. It is 
hardly more necessary to mix up linguistics with the 
study of literature than it is to mix up linguistics 
with the study of history or science. The force and 
directness of the primitive philosophy which the 
ancients said that literature is, is obscured by that 
practice. Again, "to know the best that has been 
thought and said in the world'* we shall have to be 
familiar with the literature of the world; it is not 
enough to study English literature. I have long 
wondered why we do not introduce our students to 
the world's greatest books instead of confining our- 
selves so largely to those that have been written in 
English. 

Plato must still be our guide and adviser. We 
must follow the example which he set us of very 
carefully selecting the lessons which we would 
have children study and learn. 



FORMAL DISCIPLINE AND THE STUDY 
OF THE CLASSICS 

There is evidence that the war which has been 
raging has spread beyond the battlefields of Europe 
to the ramparts of education. If controversy develops 
and can develop only about unsettled matters, 
the place of the classics seems to be of that order, 
for they exact a deal of active support from their 
upholders now-a-days. No fewer than three defenses 
of them, all of relatively recent date, are on my 
table. One is the address on " The Worth of Ancient 
Literature to the Modern World" by Viscount 
Bryce in the Fortnightly Review} Another occupies 
a full page of the Boston Evening Transcript and is 
headed: "Senator Henry Cabot Lodge in Defense 
of Classical Learning — An eloquent appeal for a 
return to the humanities by way of escape from the 
hard practical training that has ruined Europe. "^ 
The third is Professor Shorey's "The Assault on 
Humanism" which runs through two numbers of 
the Atlantic.^ There must be a reason for such a 
concourse of mighty champions. We can hardly 
assume that, like Germany, they are engaged in 
defending a homeland which had not been attacked. 

* April, 1917. Since republished by the General Education Board. 
2 June 2, 1917. In the volume of proceedings of the Princeton Con- 
ference, " The Value of the Classics," Princeton University Press. 
' June and July 1917. Reprinted as an "Atlantic Classic." 

166 



FORMAL DISCIPLINE AND THE CLASSICS 167 

At any rate, there are few signs of the times more 
encouraging than that "the languages," both in 
Europe and America, are on the defensive and that 
their heaviest artillery is brought up to protect 
them. What kind of a defense do these master 
artillerists make? Not a well-concerted one, as a 
comparative study will show. 

First, their statements are divergent. Professor 
Shorey attempts to show "why your boy should cer- 
tainly study Latin if he is going to college, and prob- 
ably, if he is going to complete a high school course." 
Viscount Bryce is more moderate. "It is generally 
admitted that at the universities the present system 
can not be maintained. Even of those who enter 
Oxford or Cambridge, many have not the capacity 
or the taste to make it worth while for them to devote 
much time there to Greek and Latin. The real 
practical problem for all our universities is this : 
How are we to find means by which the study, while 
dropped for those who will never make much of it, 
may be retained and forever securely maintained for 
that percentage of our youth, be it 20 or 30 per cent, 
or be it more, who will draw sufficient mental nourish- 
ment and stimulus from the study to make it an 
effective factor in their intellectual growth and an 
unceasing spring of enjoyment through the rest of 
life? .... We shall effect a saving if we drop 
that study of the ancient languages in the case of 
those who after a trial show no aptitude for them. 
But means must be devised whereby that study shall, 
while made more profitable through better methods, 
be placed in a position of such honor and importance 



168 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

as will secure its being prosecuted by those who are 
capable of receiving from it the benefits it is fitted 
to confer." Here is a distinction of first-rate im- 
portance which neither Professor Shorey nor Senator 
Lodge seems to have grasped. 

In the classics, Senator Lodge thinks he has found 
the philosopher's stone of education, for he declares 
that the dominant purpose of all education is to 
teach the boy or girl "so to control their minds that 
they can apply them to any subject of study and 
especially to a subject which it is a duty and not a 
pleasure to master and understand. When this 
power to use the mind is once thoroughly attained, 
the boy or girl can then learn anything which his or 
her mind is capable of receiving or acquiring. . . . 
I think we may also agree that as any form of exercise 
will develop some muscles and some forms will 
develop all, so any kind of study, properly pursued, 
whether it is arithmetic or Sanscrit, will develop the 
muscles of the mind and give it the power of con- 
tinuous application by a mere exercise of the will." 

That is the ancient doctrine of formal discipline 
in its nakedness. It is not irrelevant to ask if there 
ever really have been youths or maidens anywhere 
who have learned so to control their minds that they 
could apply them to any study whatsoever ? Would 
not that be a misfortune rather than a blessing? 
And what are those forms of exercise which will 
develop all the muscles of the body? Senator 
Lodge has evidently never burnt his fingers upon 
this much controverted educational dogma. Pro- 
fessor Shorey has, and is altogether more wary of it. 



FORMAL DISCIPLINE AND THE CLASSICS 169 

"Whatever some foolish advocates of the classics 
may have sometimes said, the systematic exaggera- 
tion of the value of merely disciplinary or gymnastic 
study is no essential element in our unwillingness to 
have American education regulated out of hand by 
experts who hate 'Lycidas* and think 'Comus' a 
bore. It is not true that the schools of to-day are 
dominated by the ideal of formal discipline." We are 
grateful to Professor Shorey for the first concession, 
but in the last statement we think he is mistaken. He 
rests his assertion upon "the actual curricula of the 
schools and the statistics of election," but greater 
familiarity with the doctrine would have shown him 
that formal discipline is not an adjective which 
applies to subjects, but a method; or, rather, the 
absence of all method — of studying them. There 
are no subjects which must be treated in that fashion. 
It is simply a mistaken way in which mistaken 
teachers may teach all subjects whatsoever if they 
have never taken pains to provide themselves with 
a better philosophy of education. That the over- 
whelming majority of teachers in elementary schools, 
high schools and colleges still wander in the limbo 
of this superstition will be evident to Professor 
Shorey if he takes pains to visit their classrooms or 
to question them upon the faith which is in them. 

Again, we are not at all sure that with all his dis- 
claiming Professor Shorey is not of their number 
himself. There is a curious kind of taking back 
what he says in one part of his article in later parts 
of it and a curious inability to write about the dogma 
of formal discipline as though he understood it. He 



170 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

avers that Mr. Flexner's main contention is "that 
psychological and educational science does not rec- 
ognize any such thing as mental discipline." That 
surely is an overstatement. Neither Mr. Flexner, 
nor any other man, who has not lost his wits, talks 
in that way. There are two kinds of mental dis- 
cipline, general and specific. The controversy is 
not about the reality of mental discipline, but about 
the reality of general mental discipline. No educator 
could work at his trade a minute longer if he denied 
the reality of specific mental discipline. If we do not 
learn what we study, why study at all? But that 
surely is very different from saying that we learn one 
thing by studying another. It is quite true that the 
technical testimony of science in respect to the 
irradiation of acquired faculty in the more elementary 
processes of the mind is still under debate, but that 
debate has already proceeded far enough to show 
that the irradiation which takes place, if it takes 
place at all, is of but very limited value and by no 
means supplies a foundation for a theory of edu- 
cation. The further investigation of the question : 
To what extent does such irradiation take place .^^ is 
an interesting problem for those investigators who 
believe that psychological questions can be made to 
take mathematical answers if pursued long enough, 
but is of no practical significance to educators, for 
the proof is already overwhelming that a philosophy 
of education simply cannot be built upon this 
quicksand. It is not true that the experimental 
study of the dogma of general discipline has nothing 
to contribute "to the practical purpose of estimating 



FORMAL DISCIPLINE AND THE CLASSICS 171 

the general disciplinary value of high school and 
collegiate studies." Upon that point Professor Spear- 
man is a more competent witness. The essential con- 
sideration is not the number of elements in common 
between the mastery of Latin grammar or vocabulary 
and other desirable kinds of knowledge ; the essential 
consideration is : Under what conditions is the 
learner likely to recognize that a form of activity is 
called for in the new situation which he is already 
familiar with in his studying of Latin grammar ; i.e.y 
under what conditions will his new problem key off or 
call forth his old familiar response.^ The answer is 
that the new situation will call forth the old response 
only when he sees it as a new case demanding a like 
treatment. He will be able to bring it under a 
familiar classification only when the familiar context 
has plenty of middle terms in common with the new. 
The reason why Latin grammar is a poor training in 
analyzing is because the material which one learns 
to analyze there is so unrelated to almost everything 
which he will ever be called upon to analyze again. 
It is non-representative material. The more one 
studies it the more his attention is diverted to that 
sort of thing, and the more of a specialist in that he 
becomes. Those who get comfort in believing that 
science leaves this question just where it found it; 
that is, "to the adjudication of common sense," are 
surely welcome to their conclusion. Only they 
should be a bit more careful not to describe it as 
intelligent or to believe that it is perfectly well 
known to competent psychologists. It is a play 
upon words to say that science has not pronounced 



172 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

a definitive verdict. Its verdicts are rarely, or 
never, definitive. Witness, for example, the Dar- 
winian hypothesis or the lack of a definitive history 
of the Greeks. In this case, as in those, there is an 
overwhelming mass of evidence which lends a strong 
presumption that upon this point Professor Shorey 
is wrong. 

It is begging the question to say that "the dead set 
against * mental discipline' is polemics, not science." 
It is mere rhetoric to dismiss the protest against the 
faculty psychology as "the most intolerable of 
twentieth century commonplaces." A professional 
student of words and their ways should be more 
careful not to misunderstand eminent psychologists, 
like Lloyd Morgan, who discuss education in terms 
of mental faculties. The words may be the same 
as Professor Shorey uses and the thought quite 
different. It may not make the slightest difference 
to secondary or collegiate education whether the 
so-called faculties of the mind "exist in separate 
form," but it does make the greatest difference 
whether or not they exist at all or are only a figure 
of speech. Referring to the metaphysical problem 
of the many and the one, lends but slight assurance. 
For purposes of education we must deal with the 
activities of mind, which are many, and acquiring 
skill in any one of them will not provide us with skill 
in general or skill other than that which we have 
specifically acquired. The burden of Professor 
Shorey's contention seems to be that we can learn 
by wholesale if we will only study Latin. He, 
like Senator Lodge, scorns to be a mere retail trader 



FORMAL DISCIPLINE AND THE CLASSICS 173 

in the market places of education. He teaches a 
preferred subject and plays lightly with great names 
and holy words to conceal its identity. Stripped of 
appealing verbosity — and, may I say, of skillful 
sophistry — its name, which escapes him but once 
according to my penciling, is linguistic analysis, or 
Latin grammar. 

I These defenders of the classics agree that it is 
their message to the heart of man which constitutes 
their supreme claim upon us ; they portray for us the 
life which our ancestors lived in antiquity; their 
hopes and fears, their triumphs and their cares, stir 
our emotions, and purify and harmonize our thoughts. 
In this way they help us to a knowledge of ourselves 
and of folks about us and, because they generate 
within us wholesome notions of things human, they 
are called humanities. No service could be greater. 
The conscious weaving of the well-selected past into 
our lives is not a part, it is the whole, of education. 
The love of the past, it has been well said, is the 
true fatherland. 

But though that and nothing else is our ideal of 
education, there are grave doubts about the suflS- 
ciency of the means which these defenders of the 
classics would employ to give them the desired 
influence over the young. They all insist that the 
Greek and Latin authors must be read in the original, 
though Viscount Bryce qualifies that statement by 
declaring that if that is not done the "style and the 
more subtle refinements of expression will be lost, 
but the facts and a great part of the thoughts will 
remain. The facts and thoughts are well worth 



174 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

having." To us they seem to be the element of 
greatest worth. K anything must be lost in our 
study, we think it should not be the thoughts which 
the writings of the master minds can arouse within 
us. But the school study of the classics fails lamen- 
tably to arouse them. In the last fifteen years it has 
been our privilege to give courses in the history of 
education in three of the large universities and one 
of the leading woman's colleges of our country. In 
that way we have had opportunity to test the famil- 
iarity of hundreds of college students of Latin and 
Greek with the thoughts and ideals of the men of the 
great past whose writings they had studied in the 
original. These students were many of them the best 
young men and women of their college and had been 
carefully prepared for its classes in the leading high 
schools and private schools of the land. Our con- 
ception of the history of education was not that of 
the ordinary textbook. We claimed for the period 
of beginnings much greater attention than for the 
eras of subsequent development. The declaration of 
Sir Henry Sumner Maine that "aside from the blind 
forces of nature, nothing moves in this world that 
was not Greek in its origin" seemed to us to be nearly 
literally true. One half of our year we spent in an 
intensive study of the life and thought of the an- 
cients. That all too brief semester was ever a season 
of delight. We examined the hideous war machine 
called Sparta ; we traced the beginnings of democracy 
at Athens ; we studied the Periclean Age and heard 
the Sophists speak to their admiring crowds of 
followers ; we followed Socrates about the streets of 



FORMAL DISCIPLINE AND THE CLASSICS 175 

his city and listened to his speech in defense of his 
Hf e ; and then we read and discussed that dialogue of 
Plato which Rousseau called "the greatest book on 
education ever written." The limits of our time 
forbade us to think of taking it up in Greek. We 
studied it in translation; we traced the spread of 
Greek education through the world, and when we 
came to Rome, we did our best to understand her 
institutions and her aims. Throughout this course 
we used the sources and attempted to reorganize and 
integrate what we had learned of Greek and Latin 
life in other classes. We had not learned much. 
Most of us had heard of Socrates and looked upon him 
as a martyr, but none of us knew what his mission in 
life had been or in what way he had made all men 
beholden to him. Only four of that long procession 
of students had made the acquaintance of Plato, 
though many had read one or more of his dialogues 
in Greek. Of Aristotle, they knew even less, and to 
my annually repeated question : What was VirgiFs 
purpose in composing the iEneid ? I never but once 
got the correct reply. 

Senator Lodge criticizes Emerson for urging the 
reading of the classics in translation. Emerson's 
well annotated books in his library at Concord 
show that that was the method which he followed. 
No other American has yet read them to such advan- 
tage. How one should read depends upon what one 
wants. If the reading is for linguistic reasons or to 
discipline the faculties of one's mind, he must keep to 
the original. But, if his purpose is not to treat his 
author as a specimen of Latin or Greek composition. 



176 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

or an exercise book in grammar, it is hardly likely 
that the young learner will make for himself as good 
and satisfactory a translation of Plato as Jowett or 
Davies and Vaughn have made for him. It is 
difficult — almost too difficult — for students to 
follow the course of Plato's thought in EngHsh ; when 
they translate him from the Greek, they forget there 
is any thought there. 

The fact is that it is mere play upon words to 
defend the study of Latin and Greek in secondary 
schools and colleges in the United States on the 
score of humanism. Humanism it is not, and 
humanism it rarely tries to be, save in written or 
spoken defenses of the study of the classics. The 
only assault which is being made upon humanism 
is that which grammarism is making. From year 
to year the pious fraud goes on and none are more 
deluded by it than the teachers of the classics them- 
selves, who seem to think that any sort of occupation 
with the text of an ancient author is sufficient to 
make his worth known and admired by the student. 
This is the familiar fallacy of the part and the whole. 
It may be true that there is no such thing as thought 
without language — though the experience of every 
one of us denies it — but it is not true that there is 
no such thing as language without thought. The 
concept and its name are as surely two different 
existences for each of us as Hamlet's wicked foster 
father declared them to be. Occupation with the 
word has always tended to prevent occupation with 
the thought which lives behind it. 

It is pleasant to turn from this bog of confusion 



FORMAL DISCIPLINE AND THE CLASSICS 177 

once more to the lucid discussion of Viscount Bryce. 
"Let us recognize that the despotism of a purely 
grammatical study of the ancient languages and 
authors needed to be overthrown. Let us also dis- 
card some weak arguments which our predecessors 
have used, such as that no one can write a good 
English style without knowing Latin. There are too 
many cases to the contrary. Nothing is gained by 
trying to defend an untenable position. What we 
are really thinking of when we talk of the ancient 
classics is something far above grammar and the 
study of words, far above even inquiries so illumina- 
tive as those which belong to Comparative Philology. 
It is the ancient world as a whole ; not the languages 
merely, but the writings; not their texts and style 
merely, but all that the books contain or suggest." 
What the books contain and suggest is indeed price- 
less, but do the students get to it who pass through 
the long grammatical discipline of the high school 
and the college ? As I understand it, it is not against 
the classics but against the patent misuse of the 
classics that the modernist protests, and his protest 
is not silenced by reminding him that he has no 
right to expect the classics to be well taught until 
he can show that other subjects are well taught also. 
That may or may not be true. The modernist 
believes that they are badly taught for the reason 
that the philosophy which is behind that teaching 
is a jumble. Professor Shorey and Senator Lodge 
have furnished him the proof that that is so. Until 
the champions of these studies disentangle the reasons 
for studying them with a bit more skill, confusion is 

N 



178 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

bound to attend the teaching of them. Even so 
clear-cut a thinker as President Hadley follows up 
his story of the boy who was asked about Julius 
Caesar and replied: "He was a great general who 
wrote a textbook for beginners in Latin," and his 
comment: "This is no unfair caricature of the 
mental attitude in which tolerably good students 
approached the great names of classical antiquity" 
with the statement: "The schoolmaster who can 
show us how to make French a means of developing 
intellectual power and persistence, as Latin or Greek 
has been the means of developing them, will confer 
a boon upon the school and college world." Power 
and persistence are the last words in his, as in 
Professor Shorey's and Senator Lodge's defense of 
them. But power and persistence are not synony- 
mous with an appreciation of human force, human 
freedom and human activity as they existed in 
antiquity. They are not even compatible with it. 
How Petrarch, Erasmus and Melancthon would 
have groaned at such a perversion of the true aim of 
their beloved studies ! They had a clearer vision. 
They knew that the preliminary philological dis- 
cipline must never be allowed to become the main 
matter. "A Latin grammar of thirty pages," said 
Matthew Arnold, "would amply suffice for the uses 
of philology." 

Professor Shorey complains that the innovators 
are robbing Greek and Latin of their saving power; 
that educational reformers are not new, wishes for a 
comparative psychology of impatient educational 
revolutionaries, and dismisses the whole brood of 



FORMAL DISCIPLINE AND THE CLASSICS 179 

them with a sneer. They are not new. This 
world has been blessed and renewed by a long line 
of them from Socrates and Plato down. They too 
had the courage of their "insensibilities." The 
type has been recurrent, for such men were needed. 
The story of education, like that of every other race- 
old endeavor, is an account of tragic mistakes, per- 
verse errors, arrogant and man-consuming tyranny 
and Moloch-like dogmatism demanding that the 
children be fed for the good of society, now to one, 
now to another, idol. No, modernism is no new 
note in education, just as it is no new note in theology 
or politics or science or philosophy. It is an ever- 
recurring operation which each generation must per- 
form upon its inheritance in order to live well, a 
service consecrated by such names as Plato, Quin- 
tilian, Abelard, Roger Bacon, Petrarch, Melanc- 
thon and John Milton, each of whom turned upon 
the futility of much which his contemporaries were 
attempting and felt himself commissioned to point 
out a better way. The conviction in the mind of 
each of them was none other than that of the greatest 
educational innovator of them all when he asserted 
that the young must have the best, whatever it is, 
if they are to have the chief thing needful. 

"The best!" That surely is worth hunting for. 
It seems to me a little incongruous to support the 
claims of the humanities by a general vilification of 
the contemporary literature of education, in which 
an honest, though at times misguided, effort is made 
to hunt for the best. Tastes in authorities differ, 
Professor Shorey has told us. So do tastes in 



180 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

methods of conducting battles and arguments. The 
berserker method has of late become a rather in- 
adequate device for spreading culture. As long as 
those who study education learn more about it 
than those who do not, it will disturb them little to 
have their knowledge called psuedo-science by a critic 
whose frantic effort for twenty years to strangle 
the infant of their tending has resulted only in 
getting for it larger and ever larger opportunities 
to grow. 

A humanist who "sticks to his last" does not need 
to be warned of the v^pU that goes before de- 
struction. The case of Darwin and the bishops 
and of the classics against science are rather too 
recent not to carry a warning. One who thinks 
that the last word about the processes of memory, 
association, judgment, and the relation of language 
to thought, was uttered by Mill, Taine, Schopen- 
hauer, Emerson, Quintilian, Cicero or Plato, or that 
they themselves did not advise search without ceas- 
ing about these very matters, has only to read them 
more carefully. 

Stripped of rhetorical verbiage, this defense of 
humanism is not at all concerned with the human 
spirit, but is mere intellectualism prescribing an arid 
regimentation of words. "Words are our substance 
here," wrote Gregory Nazianzen, " they are our 
supreme interest, we live for them, and if we are asked 
to give them up, we cannot live at all."^ That view 
was then, and is no less now, a wicked perversion of 
the teaching of Plato : "And, if you continue to be 

* " Against Julian, " 100 et seq. 



FORMAL DISCIPLINE AND THE CLASSICS 181 

not too particular about names, you will be all the 
richer in wisdom when you are an old man." ^ 

"You will agree," writes Viscount Bryce, "that 
the time has come when every one should approach 
the subject, not as the advocate of a cause, but in an 
impartial spirit." The question is not how can the 
grammatical study of Latin and Greek be preserved 
as indispensable parts of education. It cannot be 
preserved; it is already hastening to its grave. 
The question is : How can the study of the ancient 
world be brought to life as an essential part of 
education .f^ The teachers of the classics have de- 
voted themselves so exclusively to mental gym- 
nastics through linguistic exercises that the wisdom 
literature of the past has been lost and almost for- 
gotten. Humanity is not their first interest and to 
many of them it is not an interest at all. Since they 
have wrapped their talent in a napkin, it must be 
taken away from them and committed to others who 
know how to put it out at interest and derive profit 
from it. Who are those more trustworthy stewards 
who know how to use it? The teachers of history, 
ethics, philosophy, politics, literature, science, mathe- 
matics, and education. They know that the past is 
priceless because it is not dead but living. They 
know that it contributed the concepts with which 
we now work, but they also know that the student 
who would profit by the study of the classics must 
be nourished by their concepts, not their words. 

1" Statesman." 261. 



WHAT IS HISTORY AND WHY DO WE 

WANT IT?i 

I WANT first to raise the question : Why do we 
care for history ? that I may go on in the Hght of the 
answer to that question to consider what parts or 
aspects of history we really care for. Never since 
the world began has there been a time so informing 
as the present. All the forces that operate in the 
life of man have stepped out of the mists of familiar- 
ity and redefined themselves with ghastly distinct- 
ness before our eyes. We knew in a vague way that 
human existence depended upon the tilling of the 
soil; but now, when one-half the world struggles 
against starvation and the other half faces it as a 
not remote contingency, we realize the condition 
upon which soul and body remain together. Fuel 
and clothing, strangely enough, become more dis- 
tinct the farther they remove themselves from us. 
Steel and iron, railroads and ships, dollars and taxes, 
chemists and common laborers, all have lost the 
taken-for-grantedness of yesterday and, as if by 
transfiguration, have revealed the part which they 
play in the lives of us all. What a vast simplification 
is here! And how inexplicable seems the dullness 
which kept us from discerning the significance of 
these things before. And material things are not 
alone in taking on clarity of existence. Politics, 

* An address to the Political Science Association of Southern California, 
Feb. 16, 1918. 

182 



WHAT IS HISTORY? 183 

ethics, law, philosophy, religion, literature, music, 
science, mathematics, and education as well, have 
cast aside their obscurity of purpose and stand before 
us disclosing what they are and what they attempt 
to do. History, too, whose mission was even more 
obscure, perhaps, than theirs is seen to be a simple 
thing — too simple to content the craftsmanship of 
her votaries in the past and too necessary a human 
commodity to be allowed to fail us in the future. 

What is it that has made food and fuel and clothing 
and steel and money and ships stand out so clearly ? 
Our want of them. WHiat is it that has made the 
essential nature of government — morality, legalized 
action, sane thinking, true religion and undefiled, 
the criticism of life which literature is, the elevation 
of the spirit which music should be and is not, the 
service of science, the usefulness of mathematics, 
the nature and helpfulness of education, so evident 
to us all.^^ Our need for these things. We do not 
want them for themselves. We want them for 
what we can do with them, for the use we can make 
of them. They get their value wholly from our 
need. Unrelated to our purposes, they are nothing 
to us. It is not they that have changed. It is our 
purposes that have magnified themselves and the 
objects with which they deal. The war has forced 
us to be acutely conscious of wants to which we gave 
but humdrum attention as long as they seemed to 
get themselves supplied more or less automatically. 

One of these acutely sensed wants is for a knowledge 
of the conditions out of which this conflict of human 
purposes has grown. What is its history ? We must 



184 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

have that knowledge, for we must rectify this dis- 
astrous outcome in human relations and prevent it 
ever recurring again. That knowledge, therefore, 
is a matter of life and death to us all. We do not 
want it for its own sake. It is not knowing unmixed 
with volition. It is knowing demanded by volition. 
Our historians who spent their lives in reckoning 
the tendencies of the past gave us no sufficient 
account of the course which we were pursuing. 
They did not warn us of danger. They did not fore- 
tell the future which the past was creating. Theirs 
is not an exact science. Neither is meteorology, yet 
the meteorologist can discern a storm when it is 
gathering and can forecast its probable course and 
its consequences. The historians were not able to 
do that. Though it seems there were plenty of 
intimations of its coming, they passed unheeded. 
WTiy ? Most likely we shall never know the answer. 
If the business of intelligence is to foresee conditions, 
to anticipate what steps must be taken to control 
them, Germany's ability to launch a colossal war 
which she had been preparing f c r forty years, upon a 
world so innocent of what was impending, must 
remain the crowning proof of the world's unintelli- 
gence until the end of time. How it could have been 
done as it was done passes understanding. "W^y 
did not some of you professors who read German 
books and are supposed to be intelligent enough to 
understand what they contain tell us what they were 
planning and writing about ? " asked a friend of mine. 
I could reply only that their perfervid rhapsodies 
over the war which they said was coming seemed to 



WHAT IS HISTORY? 185 

us to be merely a new and strange kind of literary 
outlandishness in which they were trying to outdo 
each other. Even so close a student of things 
German and so acute a thinker as Viscount Haldane, 
in his address before the American Bar Association 
at Montreal on September 1st, 1913, took occasion 
to say that "the barbarism which once looked to 
conquest and the waging of successful war as the 
main object of statesmanship, seems as though it 
were passing away." 

Can history not predict .^^ Is its function merely 
to describe what has happened ? Can it do nothing 
to help us to take note of, and get ready for, what is 
coming? There is a saying to the effect that his- 
tory never repeats itself. If that is so, history can 
be of but slight account to us. But, is it so? If 
every moment of our lives was wholly unlike every 
moment that went before it and wholly unlike every 
moment that came after it, we should never know 
that we had a past. There would be no anticipation 
of the future. Indeed, there would be no future and 
no such thing as time, or memory, or science, or 
learning, at all. Every moment is unlike every other 
moment in some respects, but it is also like them. 
We remain somewhat the same through them all, 
our needs remain somewhat the same and the 
world of folks and of things in which we supply our 
needs remains somewhat the same. It is this one- 
ness of our lives, this relative constancy of our en- 
vironment that makes experience possible, that 
makes learning helpful, and that makes anticipation 
a means of safety. I and my fellows are different. 



186 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

We do not have the same feehngs and the same 
thoughts; we cannot even be sure that we have 
similar feehngs and thoughts; we cannot match 
them or compare them, but we do act in similar ways, 
and similarity of actions leads us to conclude that the 
thoughts and feelings which are behind our acts 
are similar also. If each generation were different 
from every other generation — wholly and com- 
pletely different — then, though the members of 
every single generation were alike and the memory 
of what its members had done since coming upon the 
earth would be of value to it, that memory of what 
any single generation had done would be of no value 
to any member of another generation than his own. 
The race would be blotted out and renewed, genera- 
tion by generation, but, according to our assumption, 
there would be no continuity of character between one 
generation and the next. In such a world, history, I 
think, would have no advantage. There would, to be 
sure, be the story of what each generation had done in 
its earlier days which its members would continue to 
tell each other until they passed from the scene; 
but just as soon as they had passed away beings 
completely different, according to our hypothesis, 
come on the stage. Their physical wants are differ- 
ent, their means of getting a livelihood are different, 
their customs and ways are different, their hopes and 
fears, their aspirations and desires are different. 
Can what happened to the animals which preceded 
them be of any concern to them ? They started no 
undertakings which the newcomers must carry on, 
they left no unfinished business which the new- 



WHAT IS HISTORY? 187 

comers must push toward completion, their experi- 
ences and their struggles have no guidance value 
for their successors. Something, many things, 
happened to them. Would the newcomers trouble 
themselves to find out what they were.^ Would 
they take pains to know a past which was merely 
past? I think not. It is continuity of purpose 
which makes history vital. The description of 
events is only a means to serve it. 

A distinguished historian in an eastern university 
tells me that another distinguished historian once 
said in his hearing, "My interest is in the future." 
"It seems a strange thing," my informant said, 
"for a historian to say. I should have thought," he 
said, "that, being a historian, he would have rec- 
ognized the fact that history deals wholly with the 
past and that the historian must be concerned with it 
alone." One of the things that this war is teaching 
is that history is not primarily concerned with the 
past. It studies the past, but always for the purpose 
of enlightening us concerning the present and to make 
us prepare for the future. No matter how much the 
historian asserts his impartiality and his scientific 
neutrality, the fact remains that he is, and must be, a 
selector. If he says that his concern is for the facts 
of the past, for the facts and all the facts and nothing 
but the facts, he must still choose them. There are 
too many of them to permit him to attend to them 
all. Take the history of the civil war. Let our 
historian set out to describe the facts of that war. 
How many of them are there ? Something happened 
to every soldier who took part in that war, from the 



188 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

moment of his enlistment to the moment of his 
mustering out. Every moment of that period 
something happened to him and Hkewise something 
happened to every man, woman and child connected 
with him and to many, perhaps even to most of the 
men, women and children in the world, because of 
that war. Now, let our scientific historian who 
undertakes to describe the past get to work. The 
task is impossible and as futile as it is impossible. 
Even the most scientific of historians does not attempt 
anything so foolish. He selects from the infinite 
mass of happenings a few, a very few, for our con- 
templation. Why does he select the ones which he 
does select? WTiy, for example, does he expect 
every school child to follow him as he attempts to 
untangle the campaigns of the Civil War? The 
only answer which I know to that question is because 
it is traditional for him to do so. Is there any real 
justification for that tradition? I do not know of 
any. A defender of that practice will say : " But 
history must be real and those campaigns are real, 
therefore they must appear in the textbooks." But 
what about the infinity of real happenings which 
do not appear there? History simply cannot be 
photographic. The historian must paint a portrait, 
he must portray the past from his point of view, 
which is far more likely to be different from that of 
other historians who have described the same period 
than to be like them. Such a thing as the definitive 
history of a state or nation, even of a dead state or 
nation, does not exist. Every generation attempts 
to write its own version of the history of Greece and 



WHAT IS HISTORY? 189 

Rome. Why is that ? The answer seems to be that 
the writing of history is a form of creating. Each 
new generation has problems of its own, problems 
which have never before come so acutely to conscious- 
ness as they do in its time. It interrogates the past 
from the viewpoint of its own problems. It seeks 
in the past some light upon their answer. From this 
standpoint, the writing of history is far more like 
the process of hunting in a letter file for a certain 
letter which you have reason to believe is there than 
attempting to make a summary of all the letters 
which one finds in the files. 

Again, under what conditions can a people have 
a history? Can Mexico with its aimless seethings 
of brigandage and faction fighting have a history? 
Can there be a history of events which are merely 
sporadic and random, which can not be strung on any 
thread of purpose? Chronicles of what has hap- 
pened there may be, but no history until some- 
thing is foreseen, imagined, desired, planned, pro- 
posed and struggled for. All history is, and must be, 
a history of undertakings ; a history of happenings is 
impossible. A world made up of insane men would 
be rich in happenings but utterly without history. 
And, whenever the actions of men nominally sane 
approach theirs in incoherence, history ceases in just 
that degree to care for that subject matter. 

Now, if we are at all right in the view that it is the 
aimfulness of human striving that gives it historical 
value, may we not at once pass to the answer to the 
second question and say that it is clear that the parts 
or aspects of history which we really care for are those 



190 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

which affect our own undertakings and shed light 
upon the purposes to which we have committed 
ourselves. It would be difficult to imagine high 
school classes spending as much energy upon the 
history of Japan or China as they now spend upon 
that of Greece or Rome, the Middle Ages or modern 
times in Europe. It would be difficult; but condi- 
tions might, and even may, arise which would send 
us all to a study of that very history of China 
or Japan which we now scorn or treat as nearly 
meaningless to us. The history of Germany existed 
in English before the war began, but it was treated 
as a rather distant and remote body of records by 
most of us. Since the war began, every part of it, 
from Tacitus down, has become alive with meaning. 
My contention, supported by these illustrations, is 
that our concern with history is because of its prag- 
matic value. That fact will be recognized in the 
future as it has not been recognized in the past, and 
the study of history, both in order to set it down, and 
to comprehend it, will take on a far more consciously 
purposive character than it has had in the past. 
The historian will try to make us acquainted with 
the streams of tendency which are pouring themselves 
through the ages in the purposive undertakings of 
the different nations and the characteristic groups 
of peoples in them, and we on our part will study 
the dynamics, rather than the statics, of the past. 
This will make the task of the historian harder, far 
harder, than it has been before; harder, but more 
meaningful, for he must analyze away the husk of 
facts and supply us with the kernel of significance. 



WHAT IS HISTORY? 191 

To do that, he must start with the very thing which 
he has systematically derided in the past ; namely, a 
philosophy of history, and by its aid he must select 
the facts which have worth from those which are 
so dead and foreign to living human interest as in no 
wise to concern it. History will then be a kind of 
chart by which human undertakings may get their 
bearings. From the standpoint of the student this 
change will result in a great simplification. His 
study of history will lead to self-orientation, rather 
than the purposeless garnering of masses of facts, 
undigested and indigestible, which he is fated to 
carry about with him as a heavy load which destroys 
his energy and results only in stupefaction. I can 
put the matter somewhat concretely in an illustration. 
There was a battle once — a little battle — at a 
place called Concord. Many things happened there. 
Every man engaged wore clothes of a certain kind, 
carried weapons of a certain sort, was commanded 
by certain officers, sang or heard certain songs, fought 
after a certain fashion, gave or received wounds. 
The details of that small battle are both numerous 
and stirring. But what is it that we want to know 
about that fight ? What is the immortal part of it ? 
The purpose which expressed itself and accumulated 
force there. If the spirit of '76 were not alive to-day. 
Concord would leave us as unmoved as King Creon's 
command that the brother of Antigone go unburied. 
WTien it makes so little difference whether a body is 
buried or not, you cannot make a tragedy out of 
the withholding of burial rites. Correspondingly, if 
the time shall ever come when it makes no difference 



192 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

to folks whether they are slaves or free, the battle 
of Concord will drop out of the histories. Marathon 
and Salamis will follow it, but rather afar off, for 
their dramatic setting gives them an added claim 
to the attention of men. Whenever men cease to 
carry that line of goods, they will cease to take 
thought of what happened at those places. For- 
getting is the great fact and at the same time the 
great necessity. We must do all in our power to 
assist it. How handicapped a world would be which 
constantly reminded its members of their ancestral 
past after the fashion of one of those tiresome and 
futile complete redintegrators of Jane Austen's novels ! 
The one way to civilize a people is to put them into 
conditions in which they will be constrained to forget 
their savagery and their barbarism. It must become 
a thing of loathing to them. Christianity was, 
perhaps, entirely justified in minimizing the impor- 
tance of the study of the ancient writings of Greece 
and Rome, for if they had not been forgotten, the 
unlovely life of which they were a part would have 
remained an object of fond recollection, and those 
who recollected it would have reenacted it and it 
would thus have lived on in the world in spite of its 
hideousness and in spite of the fact that mankind 
had found a better way. Just so Germany has not 
profited by filling its mind with the triumphs of the 
Huns or the thought of the wide extent of the 
territory over which Charlemagne ruled. The past 
may be as poisonous when remembered as it was when 
it existed. That, I think, must have been the reason 
for Lord Acton's charge: "I exhort you never to 



WHAT IS HISTORY? 193 

debase the moral currency or to lower the standard 
of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim 
that governs your own lives and to suffer no man 
and no cause to escape the undying penalty which 
history has the power to inflict on wrong." ^ J. R. 
Green has it that without the moral and spiritual 
life "history is nothing but an old almanac." ^ In 
these days of censoring we can see, I think, that the 
writing of history must be a rather vigorous censoring 
of the past. Thus does the issue stand between the 
realistic and idealistic schools of historians ; but the 
battle is going against the realists nowadays, for the 
impossibility as well as the unprofitableness of their 
program is painfully evident. On the other hand, 
Germany is a witness that history made to order will 
not do. 

What kind of history, then, do we want.'' It 
must of course be true, but it may be true and have 
no bearing upon present human undertakings; in 
that case it will be barren. To escape that, it must 
confine itself to the unfinished business of the world 
and leave the dead and inert past to bury its dead. 
WTiat I mean is that the history which is worth 
teaching is the history which will tell the student of 
Sparta and Athens and Rome and Carthage, the 
Middle Ages, and the founding of our country, such a 
story and in such a way that he will be constrained 
to say " WTiy, that is just what we are doing to-day." 
Until he can see that these are the earlier chapters of 
the same story which we of to-day are writing his 

1 "A Lecture on The Study of History," p. 63. 

2 " Historical Studies," p. 249. 
o 



194 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

study will not be of much profit to him. But they 
are the earlier chapters. The war has reestablished 
that fact in the minds of us all. They are the 
earlier chapters, and in the days to come we shall be 
interested rather more in the continuity of human 
striving, in the evolution of nations and institutions, 
in what might be called the trial balance conception 
of history, than we shall be in the daybook method of 
studying it. 

I think we have allowed ourselves to be much 
deceived by words. A large part of our study has 
been an effort to follow the careers of governments, 
nations, causes, societies, etc., mystical entities, all 
of them, and only folks voluntarily or involuntarily 
yoked together in servitude to this, that, or the other 
notion, agent, or necessity. When we discover, as 
we are now discovering, that Europe is a name for 
folks, Germany is a name for folks, France is a name 
for folks, and Greece, classical as well as present day, 
a name for folks, we shall be in a fair way to separate 
what we need to know about them from what is too 
trifling and inconsequential for us to bother about. 

I have for a long time gotten much help, both in 
my own thinking and that of my students, by asking 
the question: "W^ere is the United States?" 
The first reply is apt to be : "It is between Canada 
and Mexico and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans." 
No, that is not the United States. It is the territory, 
the land, of the United States. That was all here when 
Columbus came, but there was no United States here. 
The second answer is apt to be : "It is at Washington, 
where the President, the Congress, and the Supreme 



WHAT IS HISTORY? 195 

Court are. ' ' No, that is the government of the United 
States. Where and what is this thing that we call the 
United States? The answer is clear. It is just a 
name for folks who have united themselves together, 
to work together, and live together in certain relations 
under certain rules. The United States is only 
another name for this desire, this intention, this 
determination. If any one could separate us from 
that determination, the United States would cease 
to be. It is a choice, a purpose, a plan, a resolution 
of our minds, hearts and wills. The United States 
is only in the consciousness of its people. If they 
should cease to will it, it would cease to be. It is 
constantly renewed by every resolution of its citizens 
and by taking in new citizens who profess this con- 
viction and join its company. Now, why do we 
teach them its history ? Why do we not say to them : 
the United States is what you see here now, you have 
no need to know anything more about it. If one 
were suddenly told that he had been elected a director 
of a corporation with which he was completely 
unacquainted, what would his first question be? 
As soon as he had recovered from his first surprise, I 
think he would ask: "What is the purpose of that 
undertaking?" "In what business is that cor- 
poration engaged ? " And his second question would 
be : "What has it done up to date? What have its 
difficulties and what have its successes been? I 
want to know what I am undertaking, for the char- 
acter of my response will depend upon that." 
Whether we will it or no, each of us is a director of 
the vast corporation which we call the United States. 



196 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

It is for that reason that we must know the character 
of the business in which it is engaged and the 
successes and failures it has met in carrying on that 
business. We do not want to know all that has 
happened to it, but that which has directive value 
we must know. For that reason I regard history as 
an instrumental study whose parts must be selected 
sparingly with an eye single to their utility. We 
carry on the unfinished business which our fathers 
began. History tells us what that business is, how 
it began, what it is for, and what its difficulties and 
rewards are. 

If the United States were the United States of the 
world, this account would be sufficient to tell the 
whole story. We see now that it is not. We are 
members of a greater company, partners together in a 
vaster enterprise. We must know what the world 
undertaking is, and how that undertaking fares now 
and has fared heretofore. Folks trying to live 
together ; what are their plans, their attempts, their 
successes, and their defeats? The story of that 
purposive endeavor, and not the record of events or 
happenings, is what history is. 



RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AND THE WAR* 

First let me attempt to answer the question why 
it is we want religious education. These are the 
days of fundamental things ; we have reached rock 
bottom in human interests; we stand before the 
naked realities and reckon with them in all their 
immediateness. The covering of convention, 
custom, tradition, politeness, whim, fancy and 
habit has been stripped away ; life is no longer any- 
where a pleasant promenade along a flowery, secure, 
and well-protected way. The human race fights 
against impending slavery, and death against a 
maniacal king and a maniacal people whose mania 
is no sudden frenzy, but of that sinister kind which 
prepares by plotting and planning and accumulating 
of weapons for long years the grewsome murder 
which it would commit. 

In the presence of this horror we have no thought 
for the differences which divided us in earlier days. 
They are too trifling for consideration now. We are 
not greatly concerned that young people shall be 
taught the essential doctrines of Methodism rather 
than the creed of Congregationalism, or whether they 
are being brought up to take due note of that which 
distinguishes Baptists from Disciples or Disciples 
from Presbyterians. 

* An address before the Los Angeles Community Training College of 
Religious Education, November, 1917. 

197 



198 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

A world aflame has no heart to devise the triumph of 
the Greek church through undoing the Roman church, 
and no stomach for plans which further the Roman 
church at the expense of the Greek communion; 
neither Protestantism nor Catholicism has time or 
thought to make proselytes now. When the enemy 
of the human race has been put down we may renew 
the doctrinal and denominational diversions of an 
earlier day. My own conviction is that we will not 
renew them. We have been taught a wholesome 
lesson ; we have learned to distinguish the things of 
great moment from the things of little moment, and 
henceforth as long as your generation and mine 
lasts, we shall cleave fast to that which concerns us 
greatly. I am going to say, therefore, that our in- 
terest in religious education is far too serious to be 
sectarian. 

I am going farther than that. I am going to say 
that our primary concern with religion is not other- 
wordly, but this- worldly. Perhaps it will serve us 
beyond this world of time, perhaps it will not. We 
will wait and see. Death draws a curtain between 
this world and that — we have abiding faith that what 
matters there matters here, and matters there because 
it matters here. "Nothing but good can befall a good 
man." The only way to be worthy of continued ex- 
istence is to exist worthily now. We have hope, I 
say, of the power of religion in the hereafter. We 
are certain of our need for it now. 

And that certainty has seized upon all mankind, 
the evidence is everywhere about us. Sir Arthur 
Conan Doyle declares that when he finished his 



RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AND THE WAR 199 

medical studies he found himself a convinced 
materialist, and a convinced materialist he remained 
for many years. But when the war came "it 
brought earnestness into our souls and made us look 
closer into our beliefs and reassess their values." 
The publication by a secular writer of a book on 
religion, hot from the crucible of his own soul, devoted 
to the thesis that "Religion is the first thing and the 
last thing, and until a man has found God and been 
found by God he begins at no beginning, he works 
to no end"— that is H. G. Wells' book, "God the 
Invisible King," — and its appearance and the lively 
interest it has evoked show that the war has indeed 
brought earnestness into our souls. You, your- 
selves, yes, all of us, are witnesses to it. We are 
undergoing a reawakening of religion and strangely 
enough, though men die by millions, this revival of 
religion has amazingly little to do with the hereafter. 
It is desperately concerned with the here and now. 

How came this new-found need for religion into the 
world? The Germans are responsible for it; they 
have forced the human race to this discovery as to so 
many other discoveries. They have in their own 
person shown us what religion is not, and what it 
must be, and is. If they win this war, it will be the 
overthrow of Christianity. Never before has the 
religion of compassion been so defied as now. 

Let me show you two pictures — the first from Ger- 
many, the second from the Bible. 

"Inasmuch as in all ages," says Nietzsche, "as 
long as mankind has existed, there have always been 
human herds (family alliances, communities, tribes, 



200 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

peoples, states, churches) and always a great number 
who obey in proportion to the small number who 
command — in view thereof of the fact that 
obedience has been most practiced and fostered among 
mankind hitherto, one may reasonably suppose that, 
generally speaking, the need thereof is now innate in 
every one as a kind of formal conscience which gives 
the command : Thou shalt unconditionally do some- 
thing, unconditionally refrain from doing something. 
In short *Thou Shalt.' This need tries to satisfy 
itself and to fill its form with a content; according 
to its strength, impatience and eagerness ; it thereby 
seizes as an omnivorous appetite with little selec- 
tion, and accepts whatever is shouted into its ear 
by all sorts of commanders — parents, teachers, laws, 
class prejudices, or public opinion." ^ " He who would 
command finds those who must obey."^ "An effort 
and a risk seemed all commanding unto me; and 
whenever it commandeth the living thing risketh 
itself. Yes, when it commandeth himself, then also 
must it atone for its commanding. Of its own law 
must it become the judge and avenger and victim." ' 
"The object is to attain that enormous energy of 
greatness which can model the man of the future by 
means of discipline, and also by means of the anni- 
hilation of millions of the bungled and botched, and 
which can yet avoid going to ruin at the sight of the 
suffering created thereby the like of which has never 
been seen before."^ "He believes that danger, 

'"Beyond Good and Evil," p. 120; Levy's translation. 

2" Will to Power," Vol. I, p. 105. 

3 Zarathustra, II, XXXIV. ^ "'WUI to Power," Vol. II, p. 368. 



RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AND THE WAR 201 

severity, violence, peril in the street and in the 
heart, inequality of rights, secrecy, stoicism, 
seductive art and deviltry of every kind — in short 
the opposite of all gregarious desiderata — are neces- 
sary for the elevation of man. . . . The aim should 
be to prepare a transvaluation of values for a 
particularly strong kind of man, most highly gifted 
in intellect and will, and to this end slowly and 
cautiously to liberate in him a whole host of slandered 
instincts hitherto held in check. Whoever meditates 
about this problem belongs to us, the free 
spirits. . . ." ^ " He is colder, harder, less cautious, 
and more free from the fear of public opinion; he 
does not possess the virtues which are compatible 
with respectability and with being respected, nor 
any of those things which are counted among 'the 
virtues of the herd' .... He would rather lie 
than tell the truth because lying requires more spirit 
and will. There is a loneliness in his heart which 
neither praise nor blame can reach, because he is his 
own judge from whom is no appeal." ^ 

And the word of the master became the deed of 
his followers, the deeds which this people to whom 
Nietzsche was a prophet and lawgiver, have com- 
mitted. The essence of Pan-Germanism, says one of 
their own writers. Dr. Friederich Curtius, is Atheism. 
Its ** purpose is nothing less than to compass the 
suppression of the Christian faith and the morality 
which is its outcome. A German religion is to be 
born, a religion allied to the Woden worship of our 
ancestors. . . . The German nation representing 

\" Will to Power," Vol. II, p. 363. 2 /^^^.^ p. 356. 



202 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

the noblest and most favored of races, the loftiest 
revelation of humanity, has become its own God." 

Anti-Christ has come, for this people denies and 
tramples on all things Christian. Ever since the 
war began mankind has felt that it is civilization 
itself which is assaulted. And this wholesale de- 
fiance of Christian adjuration and precept has forced 
the lesson upon us that civilization and Christianity 
are not indeed two things, but one. He who talks of 
religious education and plans and devises its extension 
has no other thought than to preserve in a day of peril 
and of terrible undoing all that the race holds dear. 

Let us put over against this paranoia of the Ger- 
mans some statements of essential Christian belief. 
Israel is forever talking of the Eternal and saying 
that man achieves not by power but by His righteous 
spirit. The Eternal is righteousness and loves 
righteousness. From Genesis where the Eternal 
declares *' I know him [Abraham] that he will command 
his children and his household after him, and they 
shall keep the way of the Lord to do justice and 
judgment"^ down through the long ages to the last 
word of Daniel, the prophet of the Captivity, the note 
is the same : "At the beginning of thy supplications 
the commandment came forth and I am come to 
shew thee. . . . Seventy weeks are determined 
upon thy people and upon thy holy city to finish 
the transgression . . . and to make an end of sins 
and to make reconciliation for iniquity and to bring in 
everlasting righteousness." ^ The Psalms are full of 
it : "But I trusted in Thee, O Lord ; I said. Thou art 

1 Genesis xvm ; 19. ^ Daniel ix ; 23 and 24. 



RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AND THE WAR 203 

my God" (Ps. xxxi; 14). "Blessed is the Nation 
whose God is the Lord" (Ps. xxxiii; 12). "Their 
sorrows shall be multiplied that hasten after another 
god" (Ps. XVI ; 4). "Thou satest in the throne 
judging right" (Ps. ix; 4). " The Lord trieth the 
righteous : but the wicked and him that loveth vio- 
lence his soul hateth" (Ps. xi ; 5). " Trust in the Lord 
and do good" (Ps. xxxvii ; 3). "If I regard iniquity 
in my heart the Lord will not hear me" (Ps. 
Lxvi; 18). "Come, ye children, hearken unto me; 
I will teach you the fear of the Lord. Keep thy 
tongue from evil and thy lips from speaking guile; 
Depart from evil and do good, seek peace and pursue 
it" (Ps. xxxiv; 11, 13, 14), and of the Eternal's 
enemies David says : " For the wicked boasteth of his 
heart's desire and blesses the covetous whom the 
Lord abhorreth; the wicked through the pride of 
his countenance will not seek after God. God is 
not in all his thoughts. His ways are always griev- 
ous ; thy judgments are far above out of his sight ; 
as for all his enemies, he puffeth at them. He hath said 
in his heart, I shall not be moved for I shall never 
be in adversity. His mouth is full of cursing and 
deceit and fraud, under his tongue is mischief and 
vanity. . . . Wherefore doth the wicked contemn 
God? He hath said in his heart. Thou wilt not 
require it. Thou hast seen it for thou beholdest 
mischief and spite to requite it with thy hand ; the 
poor committeth himseK unto thee, thou art the 
helper of the fatherless. Break Thou the arm of the 
wicked and the evil man, seek out his wickedness 
till thou find none" (Ps. x; 3-7, 13-15). 



204 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

We are speaking of religious education. There 
can be no such a thing as education until there is a 
lesson to be taught, instruction to be given, compre- 
hended, and acted upon. Rites can not be taught, 
they can only be performed. If Christianity is a 
religion of rites, you do not want a teacher, you want 
a priest to perform a ritual. A great many folks 
think that Christ came to perform a rite, the most 
significant sacrificial rite ever performed on earth. 
To others he is a teacher sent from God — the great 
Teacher. W^at did he teach .^^ Three lessons, I 
think, that the world must learn if it would be Chris- 
tian, and that we must teach if we would be teachers 
of Christianity. 

The first is that the Eternal is our Father ; that his 
Spirit of righteousness moves in all things and is the 
very life of the universe. Eye hath not seen him 
nor ear heard, he does not come to us from outside, 
he is within us, nearer than hands and feet — a 
firm conviction assuring us that though the heavens 
fall and the earth be wracked, and the wicked rage 
and destruction and sin seem to command all things, 
yet is righteousness the law of the Eternal, and we 
must not for a moment doubt it. To hold fast to this 
conviction is hard, for at times such as these we live 
in, men seem to forget the difference between right 
and wrong, God seems to go out of existence and life 
to become a great orgy of vanity and idiocy ; yet 
we must have faith, the kind of faith that Robert 
Louis Stevenson uttered when he said, "I believe 
in a principle of decency in things, yea, though I 
woke in hell, should still believe it." 



RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AND THE WAR 205 

And the second lesson, which the great Teacher 
taught is : you, I, every man is a son of the Eternal 
Father. Christ never forgot that relation. He 
repeatedly spoke of himself as the elder brother, and 
of the rest of us as members of that family. Think 
what a transformation it would bring in our lives if 
we would take this seriously and think of ourselves in 
that way, — if every morning when we got up, we 
should say to ourselves. Son of God, what work is 
worthy of thee to-day, or when faced by a temptation, 
we should remember to ask ourselves, Son of God, 
what action befits thee now.?^ 

And the third lesson follows immediately from these, 
if God is the Father and I am his son, and you are 
his son, then we are brothers, brothers to all men, 
members of the family of mankind, in duty bound to 
live in the community, by the community, and for 
the community, all members one of another. 

That is Christ's program, that is his revelation. 
It is to that life that he is the way. And those who 
study religion are occupied in learning what that 
righteousness is which is the essence of the Eter- 
nal, and in identifying themselves with it trait by 
trait in their daily giving and taking with their 
fellowmen. 

*'May it not be said,'* writes Sabatier, "that for 
our contemporaries, religion is the instinctive need by 
which a man is led to realize his better self, to unite 
with those who can serve him as guides or companions 
in that difficult task and to endeavor to realize 
together with them what the inner witness pre- 
scribes ? 



206 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

"In so far as man considers, reflects, and discusses, 
philosophy exists. ReHgion exists when man, ceasing 
to be merely a witness of his own life, and that of the 
community, throws his will into the balance, proclaim- 
ing himself a collaborator in the eternal task which 
he apprehends and to which he devotes himself."^ 

I am not at all interested in that religious in- 
struction which consists only in the memorization 
of portions of the Bible, the creed and the catechism. 
There is to be sure some gain in enlarging one's 
vocabulary from such a rich collection of words as 
the Bible contains, but it is gain of language merely, 
and while that is valuable, we lose our object if we 
stop at that. And I do not believe in religious 
education merely as an effort to make young folks 
familiar with the literature of the Jewish people. 
Matchless though that literature is, it would be a 
very profanation of opportunity to study it, and 
not to study it as vastly more than a series of poetical 
or of prose narratives. It is a question whether any 
of the productions of the past, which is worth study- 
ing, is to be treated merely as an opportunity for 
literary analysis or literary appreciation. The object 
of the great writers was not to produce literature, but 
to counsel, warn, and encourage, that is, to instruct 
their readers. To get that counsel, warning and 
encouragement is the prime reason for studying the 
Bible. 

And I do not think we can agree with the French- 
man, Jouffroy, that when the church teaches us its 
catechism after the commonly accepted fashion, and 

iSabatier, "France Today," p. 19; Dutton & Co. 



RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AND THE WAR 207 

then "asks the young Christian, whence he came? 
he knows it. Whither he is going ? he knows it. How 
he is to attain his end.^ he knows it. She asks 
this poor child, who never in all his life thought about 
such matters, why he is here, and what will become 
of him after death? he gives a sublime answer. 
She asks how the world came into existence, and why 
God made it and the plants and animals ? How the 
earth was peopled, how diversity of language, 
how suffering originated ? He knows all." ^ 

That method of religious instruction has been tried, 
and has proven to be worse than a failure. The one 
nation which has made a place for religious in- 
struction of that sort in its public schools, as well as 
in its churches and its homes, for all these years has 
shown itself to be more unprincipled than a society 
of criminals, more savage than the most ferocious 
savages. While it memorized and repeated the 
words of the meek and lowly Jesus, its people plotted 
murder and every form of anti-Christian wickedness, 
and said in its heart, there is no God. 

We can not do without theology any more than 
we can do without philosophy, for the most important 
thing about any of us at all times, and in all places, 
is the notion of the nature of things, the notion of 
what sort of a place this universe is, that he carries 
about with him. There is a tendency to delusion 
in each of us, which must constantly be combated 
or our theology will sink into idolatry or become 
fouled with superstition. The only way to keep our 

^Jouffroy, "Melanges Philosophiques," p. 424, quoted by Bruce, in 
" Social Aspects of Christian Morality." 



208 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

notions of God from becoming incrusted with false 
opinions, which do both us and Him dishonor, is to 
be critical of them, to question them, to talk about 
them, to put them to the test and prove them. The 
trouble with memorizing as a method of religious 
instruction is that it prevents that. The German 
people memorized their religion and threw themselves 
heart and soul into proving to themselves and to each 
other that they were far too great a people to be 
bound by the ordinary notions of morality, until they 
actually were convinced by their words, and retain 
their religion which forbids such action merely as an 
empty shell. 

I heard the Vicar of the Cathedral in Montreal 
preach a most remarkable sermon about a year ago 
at Appleton Chapel. He spoke of the changes which 
the war is making and particularly of the change in 
religion. He referred to the Jewish conception of 
the Eternal as demanding righteousness and to the 
fact that Judaism was wholly unable to formulate 
definitions of its beliefs. The Greeks supplied these 
definitions, they organized the creeds of Christianity, 
and we cling to them as though they were the essence 
of the matter. We say that people must accept the 
creed to join the church, yet we know that they are 
saved by character. We must redefine the kingdom 
of God in terms of goodness and character and all 
good men must unite together to build up the 
earth. 

Here is a new program for Christianity, but it is 
an old program. It is Abraham's program, David's 
program, Daniel's program, Christ's program. 



RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AND THE WAR 209 

There never was a time since civilization began 
when its program called so loudly for championship 
and support. We live in the age of completed 
sinfulness. Righteousness, goodness, kindliness, 
meekness, and every other virtue which Christ taught, 
and with which he and the prophets and lawgivers 
before him sought to save the world have been 
derided as mere feebleness and unmanliness. Shall 
the world forsake this way or shall it turn upon 
the enemy and destroy him by borrowing his weapons 
and using them against him ? 

There never has been so clear a proof of the power 
of education in all history as that which Germany 
provides. Here was a people obviously devoted to 
idealism, to Christianity, to homely life, and to the 
simpler virtues, whose leaders many years ago set 
about converting it to their mad plan of capturing 
the world. They used the school and the school- 
master as their instrument, and employed the drill 
sergeant and the parade ground to complete the 
work which he began. They pounded in patriotism, 
they indoctrinated every German with the thought 
of national superiority. They caused them to 
repudiate their own natural kindliness, to turn 
against the teachings of their faith, to make nothing 
of their habitual morality, to take little thought for 
life itself if it could be offered to help to build the new 
Moloch, which the nation was obsessed to erect. 

We cannot make out how their minds work or 
understand why they value these things, we hate 
and abhor their actions, yet we must admit that their 
instructors have done the job thoroughly; there is 



210 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

among them a unanimity in wickedness, which is 
appalling. If we should bend ourselves with the 
same energy to teaching the lesson of righteousness, 
could we not hope for as complete a result ? 

A friend of mine has recently called my attention 
to this more encouraging aspect of things. His 
question concerned Democracy. "We know very 
well," he said, "what notions destroy it, and what 
notions make it strong. We also know the public 
school is its conserver, that if it can be saved any- 
where, the place of its salvation is the public school. 
Now let us, therefore, with one accord, after the 
German fashion, by incessant indoctrination commit 
the children of the public schools to the thoughts and 
actions which conserve democracy; for example, 
every public office is created to accomplish a certain 
work, not for the sake of providing a living merely 
to the person who holds it. Could we not by in- 
cessantly bearing down upon the fact that public 
office is opportunity for service, in a generation, 
create a body of public servants who would have no 
other notion of their work?" 

It is a great undertaking, yet it can be done, but 
only upon one condition, that the teachers shall first 
be trained to the point of being obsessed by that idea. 

The same thing is true of religious education. It 
is surely easier to train the young to an unffinching 
devotion to righteousness than it is to train them to 
an unnatural wickedness when all that it promises is 
an opportunity to die for its unholy cause. Yet the 
Germans have accomplished that, and we may 
profit by their experience to undertake the opposite. 



RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AND THE WAR 211 

Religious education is not different in anything, 
save in its purpose, from the other forms of education. 
The same principles apply, the psychological pro- 
cedure and the methods are the same. The lessons 
(I mean the collection of verses, and chapters in the 
hands of the learner) are not the chief thing. Next 
to the learner the teacher is. The choicest and most 
life-giving material in the whole Bible may become 
repellant and forbidding, or at least merely a tale 
which is told, in the hands of a poor teacher ; whereas, 
it is sure to be surcharged with life in the hands of a 
good one. The main thing in this form of education, 
as in every other, is first to determine what it is we 
are trying to do, what result we are seeking to accom- 
plish. The next step is to gather the tools, which 
contribute to that result, and of these the trained 
and skillful teacher is by far the greatest. 



OUR UNDERTAKING AND WHY WE 
UNDERTAKE IT NOW ^ 

This is a war of nations. It is everywhere 
conceded that the victory, when it comes, will 
belong to that nation or group of nations which 
comes out of the conflict least broken, best prepared 
in spite of the demoralization of battle to take up the 
pursuits of peace. To make war to the utmost, 
and at the same time to make as active preparation 
as may be for the only kind of peace which gives 
our war meaning or value, is our program. That 
is the program of England also. Of the many 
manifestations of her unconquerable spirit, none 
is more striking or convincing than that, contrary 
to what might have been expected, her people are 
not wholly consumed by the demands of war, but have 
energy and interest enough to plan a reform in their 
national education as significant and almost as far- 
reaching as the reform of 1870. The very tension 
of war has aroused them to consider a thorough- 
going augmentation of elementary education as in- 
dispensable to the national welfare. Mr. Herbert 
Fisher, the eminent president of the British Board 
of Education, has for some months been riding a 
circuit of Great Britain telling its people that "the 

* Inaugural address, Los Angeles State Normal School, January 5, 
1918. 

212 



OUR UNDERTAKING 213 

whole future of our race, and of our position in the 
world, depends upon the wisdom of the arrangements 
that we make for education," and asking them to 
support the Education Bill that his department has 
introduced, which prohibits the employment of 
children attending an elementary school during the 
hours that the schools are in session, provides for 
all children a full-time elementary education up to 
the age of fourteen years, and prevents their edu- 
cation from coming to an end when they leave the 
elementary school, by requiring that all young 
persons who have not received a full-time secondary 
education up to the age of sixteen years or are not 
under suitable instruction, must attend daytime 
continuation classes for 320 hours per year from the 
age of fourteen to the age of eighteen. And, al- 
though the finances of Great Britain are at present 
under a somewhat heavy strain, yet the Commons is 
asked this year to appropriate $19,000,000 more for 
education than it appropriated last year. The 
Minister's appeal to his people to regard education 
as a most important branch of the national service 
has resulted in an active recruiting of the teaching 
forces by the college women of England. Though 
she is fighting for her existence as a nation. Great 
Britain is more alive to the needs of education to-day 
than ever before in her history. 

It is not otherwise with France — a few months 
ago the regents of the University of New York sent 
their distinguished Commissioner of Education to 
study and report upon conditions there. "I went," 
says Mr. Finley, "to see the schools in which France's 



214 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

valor has been nourished." He came back with the 
warning that 

The intellectual and moral discipline, through which the 
children of one generation become the citizenry of the next, 
must be vigorously maintained in war time. France has 
restricted the use of food, fuel and light, but she has not taken 
from any child the heritage in which alone is the prophecy of 
an enduring nation. 

The army and the school are the two agencies 
upon which the state relies in its day of extremity. 
If its army has been weak, it must make it strong and 
retrench in other departments of its life to do that. 
The school has an equal claim upon it. It exists for 
the general benefit also. It, too, is for public safety. 
The peril of our country brings a new realization of its 
importance. It is the agency created by govern- 
ment to consciously unify people, to consciously and 
systematically conserve ideals, to consciously mold 
and integrate public opinion, to consciously and 
persistently safeguard and increase the physical 
well-being of the coming generation, to consciously 
shape the instinctive desires and attitudes of the 
young to social ends, to transform the diffused and 
heedless energy of youth into socially necessary 
forms of skill, and withal to incite each child to 
vigorous and noble aspiration. If we are not dis- 
appointed when the President of the United States 
calls upon us to show ourselves a united people, we 
must remember that the unity with which we stand 
together is no happy accident, but the product of an 
intelligence which has been taught to distinguish 
right from wrong by indoctrination, long, patient 



OUR UNDERTAKING 215 

and, as we now see, effective ; if in this our hour of 
destiny, we are elated to discover that we are indeed 
a people who fear slavery more than death, it is 
because we have been taught that lesson from our 
infancy ; if the minds of folks are clear, stable, and 
agreed about what we must do, it is the schools which 
have made it possible for the public to have an 
opinion ; if our youth, who take up arms by millions, 
are spirited, brave, and strong, the public school has 
done its part by them ; if in the moment in which 
they go forth to battle there is no frenzy of delight, 
no barbaric lust to fight and conquer and despoil, 
but everywhere the subdued feeling of stern and 
regrettable necessity, and a deep preference for the 
unboastful ways of peace, it is because the school has 
tamed our inborn savagery and taught our feral 
nature to prefer the kindlier life ; if we are resourceful 
and inventive, skilled in all the implements of con- 
struction and to shape and use the weapons of defen- 
sive war, it is because the school has made us all 
familiar with "the go" of things; if ten thousand 
forges are at this moment engaged in shaping cannon, 
and a thousand factories build aeroplanes, and five 
hundred shipyards construct ships, and men are 
drilling everywhere to man them, it is because our 
500,000 schoolrooms have quietly been shaping us 
through the years to meet just such eventualities. 
In times like these, the public school gets a new 
mandate from the people. Its reason for being 
becomes clear to everybody ; its work becomes a 
new concern of all. It is seen to be the factory of 
democracy, the agency which conditions and creates 



216 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

the national life. It is urged to bend itself with re- 
doubled energy to its task. If it has done much and 
well in the past, it must do more and better in the 
future. The Germans, we are told, "are all taught 
why they should not wish to be free; but we are 
not taught why we should wish to be free." We 
accept that as instinctive. It must in days to come 
become articulate. There are many kinds of freedom 
and many ways by which real freedom once gained 
may be lost in spite of our devotion. It is a pretty 
blind and confused notion to most of us, and the 
means for safeguarding it are rather obscure and 
indefinite save when our organized liberties are 
menaced from without. We must make the main- 
tenance and conserving of our democratic nation a 
universally comprehended program. There has been 
much talk about Americanizing the foreigner who 
comes among us. We are all being Americanized 
nowadays. It is a delightful experience. We shall 
not be slow in claiming a similar privilege for our 
children. After the first rush of arming is past we 
shall have educational drives as well as Liberty 
Loan drives. Red Cross drives. Food Conservation 
and Red Triangle drives. The nation at high ten- 
sion is consulting its own welfare. Quite apart from 
the necessity of devising ways and means of pro- 
tracting its self-defense, a people sacrificing itself 
for liberty can not escape a lively interest in the 
generation it is striving to make free. "We arm 
for men that are to be." Shall we not arm them as 
well as ourselves ? 

This school believes it has a part to play in that 



OUR UNDERTAKING 217 

educational arming. It is fortunately situated in 
the midst of a series of the most active and perhaps 
the most successful public schools in this or any 
other country. It takes pride in them and dares to 
believe itself responsible in part for their well-being, 
for those who have labored here in past time have not 
struggled and toiled in vain. But it longs to perform 
an even larger service, for it aims to be an institution 
which shall add to its worth. 

We do not agree with Nietzsche when he says : 

The education of the masses can not ... be our aim; but 
rather the education of a few picked men for great and lasting 
work. 

The few picked men theory of life seems to us to 
hasten to destruction. That may be the ideal of 
education in a master and slave autocracy ; it is 
not and can not be the aim of education in a demo- 
cratic state such as we believe ours to be and are 
resolved to increase and perpetuate. Our ministry 
is therefore to the elementary schools and through 
them to the secondary schools, the colleges and the 
universities. Contrary to widely accepted notions, 
we look upon their welfare even in war time as 
subordinate to no other concern of the nation. 
While many treat them with condescension because 
they teach elementary studies, we regard them as 
the most important of all just for that reason. We 
think that the elements which they teach are not 
childish things to be put away when the student no 
longer thinks as a child or speaks as a child, but are 
instead the fundamentals of the activities of the 
human race, lessons which it begins in babyhood, 



218 WHAT THE WAR TEACHEB 

but which it can not put aside so long as life endures. 
**If we think of it, all that a university can do for 
us," says Carlyle, "is still what the first school 
began doing — teach us to read." The elements 
of the higher, or better, the later, schools' whole 
program are begun in the first school which the child 
attends. It teaches him the common language, and 
lays a foundation for all his subsequent study of the 
mother tongue ; it teaches him to write, to compose 
his own letters, to draft his own little essays, and so 
makes a beginning of the difficult subject which his 
maturer years will study and practise as English 
composition. It gives him his first lessons in the 
great art of calculation; his subsequent study of 
mathematics will be profitable or unprofitable to 
him in proportion to the success with which he 
grasps and learns to work with the notions which 
are symbolized by figures. It introduces him to the 
yesterdays of the human race and tries to make him 
see that events and actions produce other events and 
actions here in this world of time; all history is 
his now for the asking. It is in his first school that 
he begins to examine trees and plants, and stones 
and soils, and forms his notions of the universe and 
starts his conquest and domestication of nature. It 
is sometimes said that the university exists to train 
leaders. It is, perhaps, more exact to say that it 
exists to train to yet larger leadership the leaders 
whom the elementary and the secondary schools 
send to it. Its leaders are leaders before they 
arrive at the university, and but for distinguishing 
themselves in the elementary schools, they would 



OUR UNDERTAKING 219 

hardly make their way to the university at all ; had 
not the first chapters of the romance of learning 
appealed to them, they would have had no interest in 
the later chapters of its story. There is good ground 
for believing that the youth is more often made 
into a scholar by his first teacher than by his last 
one. At any rate, he seems either to learn how to 
study in the elementary school or almost never to 
learn how to study at all. If we but have good 
elementary schools, all the other educational blessings 
will add themselves unto us, but if we make the 
mistake of neglecting them and give the substance 
of our attention to the education which belongs to 
later life, we shall fail to make it enduring. Another 
way of saying this is, that only an intelligent people 
has need for universities. It is a singular fact that 
it was not until the common-school revival or indeed 
until the free-school system had begun to build 
itself strong at the end of our Civil War, that the 
colleges of our country amounted to much of any- 
thing or began to be of any very vital service. 

Considerations such as these force us to claim for 
the elementary schools a larger measure of assistance 
than they have had in the past. Their work must 
be done, though other forms of education wait. 
What that indispensable work is, calls for careful 
definition. We derive no encouragement nowadays 
from the assurance that young folks are spending a 
proper fraction of their waking lives in keeping 
company with spelling, arithmetic, geography, and 
history. We no longer get any comfort whatever 
from the thought that though they may not be 



220 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

learning anything which they will ever have occa- 
sion to use, their minds are in some mysterious way 
being made better and stronger than they were 
before. There is no magic in studies. We no 
longer look up to them or say prayers to them or 
perform rites of homage and worship in their presence. 
There may have been a time when woodcutters pros- 
trated themselves before their axes or hunters said 
prayers to their rifles, but that was in the super- 
stitious days before they had learned that an ax or a 
rifle has no value save as one can use it. Just so 
with studies ; they have no life in them, no power 
to bless or transform us. They are not centers or 
sources of energy. Though our tendency to delusion 
may hypostatize them and treat them as self-existing 
entities, they have no beneficent vitality at all. 
They are not ends but means, nothing but tools which 
the race has wrought out to assist its members in 
the great business of living, tools which we must 
learn to use if we would arm ourselves for the 
struggle of existence. 

This world has at last reached the stage where it 
sees that philosophy is the determining factor in 
man's being; that conflicting notions of the way 
to think of, and plan, human arrangements are 
responsible for the bloodshed and the devastating 
woes which now so overwhelmingly beset the earth. 
A great prayer goes up from every land for sounder 
notions of the way to live. This red baptism of 
agony and death is purging us of our delusions and 
vanities and bringing us to the essential realities. 
Education can not escape that purging. It, too, 



OUR UNDERTAKING 221 

must cut away unessentials ; it, too, must abandon 
confusion, waste, and vanity, and be guided by a 
philosophy. That philosophy will not be material- 
ism, for we have all seen that material things can not 
function as ultimate motives. It will not be a romantic 
sentimentalism, for that, too, has been found to 
be as humanly destructive as the lust for things. It 
will be inevitably an utilitarianism, for we now know 
with tried certainty that nothing counts but that 
which really and vitally serves the good of folks. 
Seek ye first a sound philosophy, therefore, and all 
things else will be added unto you, and above all, 
seek philosophy, ye who are teachers ! 

As we look back upon our past we see that we did 
and suffered many things before the war which we 
can not go on doing now. We talked of knowledge 
as an end in itself, we said we taught literature for 
the sake of literature, science for the sake of science, 
spelling for the sake of spelling, history just because 
it was history, and geography for the sake of geog- 
raphy. We know now that that was gibberish, 
rapid, unmeaning jargon, if it was not, indeed, some- 
thing worse. We sometimes said that though we 
were not training our students to do anything in 
particular, we were helping them to do many things 
in general. We have now learned to sharpen our 
purposes so that we may not allow those who come 
under our influence to waste themselves upon vain 
things. This school feels that it has a duty to help 
the elementary school teachers of Southern California 
to distinguish worth from un worth and to reconstruct 
their work. They ask us for that help. We have 



222 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

been placed together here in this favored corner of 
earth evidently that we may labor together. We 
are free from bondage to a constraining educa- 
tional tradition. We can work together to fabricate 
the future, we can make education produce results 
such as it has not yet produced for any of us, we can 
separate the wheat from the chaif in school studies. 
Instead of teaching spelling for the sake of spelling we 
can put a committee of the best-informed special- 
ists in all the schools of this region to work to 
select from the 400,000 words in the English 
language the 1000 words, more or less, which folks 
have need to spell when they write; and having 
thus sorted the few words which we all need to know 
how to spell from the many which it would be 
foolishness and waste of time to study, our committee 
can next hunt through the literature which reports 
the experiments which have been made, and tell us 
what is the best way to go about studying the spelling 
of these words so that every child shall have full 
opportunity to learn to spell them. Another con- 
joint committee selected from the schools and from 
the faculty of the normal school can present a 
similar plan for the teaching of reading. Another 
one can study and report on how to acquire the 
difficult art of penmanship. We have been told for 
years that arithmetic should be reduced to lower 
terms and better results should be gotten in its 
teaching. We all agree to that, but no one knows 
just what lessons in arithmetic should be taught 
and what should be omitted and just how they 
should be taught to get the results that the schools 



OUR UNDERTAKING 2^3 

are expected to produce. We can have a committee 
of experts work upon that problem and when they 
bring in their report we can incorporate it into our 
courses of study and with one accord go to work upon 
that better plan. Instead of continuing to teach 
10,000 facts a year to each school child who attempts 
to study geography, we can call together a group of 
experts who shall select for us those five hundred 
geographical facts, more or less, which each school 
child should learn to work with in his use of that 
subject. We can in a similar fashion find out what 
are the essential lessons which should become 
organic principles in every child who studies the 
history of our country. We can perform the same 
service for our common study of our language, of 
music, art, manual training, elementary science, and 
physical training. When we have worked out our pur- 
poses and aims and have shaped our courses and 
our means, we can then intelligently supervise our 
teaching and weigh and measure its results. 

To the question, then, what may a normal school 
do for the community in the midst of which it is 
planted? we reply, it can be an organizing center 
for the work of that community's schools. But it 
can not do that if it conceives of its function narrowly ; 
it can not do that if it stands apart from the educa- 
tional agencies of its neighborhood. It is created 
by the state to serve, and serve it must, if it would 
fulfill its mission. 

It must not merely accept students who apply for 
its instruction, it must select them. It must send 
its representatives into the high schools to urge the 



224 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

importance of the teacher's calling upon young men 
and young women who are engaged in choosing the 
form of service which they shall attempt to render to 
society. It must do its utmost when they come to 
its classes to help them to a vision of the life of man 
here on this earth, and to fit them to guide and direct 
that life to worthy ends. And, when after careful 
proving they are guaranteed by us as fit and able 
to be intrusted with the instruction of the young, we 
should follow them into their classrooms with our 
encouragement and our help to see to it that the 
labor which the state has committed to us by no 
means fails to be performed. 

Since the art of shaping human powers and fitting 
them for social service is **the supreme art," since the 
community's duty to education "is its paramount 
moral duty," and since the teacher is engaged, not 
in training individuals alone, but in consciously 
shaping the future, in training the teachers who are 
to direct the forces and influences which play upon 
the young, we are attempting nothing less than to 
perfect the best of artists. We need time and infinite 
patience for that great task. Ours is a professional 
school. We have no desire to make it a general 
culture college, but we do want to be permitted 
to do the work which has been assigned to us thor- 
oughly, carefully, and well, and we do want to be 
able to attract to this school its share of the earnest- 
minded, capable, and ambitious young people of this 
community. This school offers a four-year course 
to prepare teachers of music to give instruction in 
that subject in high schools, it has another four-year 



OUR UNDERTAKING 225 

course to prepare teachers of drawing, another four- 
year course to prepare teachers of domestic science, 
another four-year course to prepare teachers of 
physical training, another for teachers of mechanic 
arts, and still another for teachers of commercial 
branches. This is as it should be, for the time is 
none too long or the instruction too thorough to 
accomplish the results which we seek. But, side by 
side with our four-year courses to train teachers to 
teach single subjects in high schools, we have a two- 
year general professional course to train teachers 
to teach all the subjects which are taught in ele- 
mentary schools. The thing simply can not be done. 
The disparity is far too great. If we are to perform 
the service which the state has commissioned us to 
render, we must have more time in which to per- 
form it. 

We want to be a professional school worthy of 
the name and of the place in which we work. By 
that we mean that we want to teach everything 
which we teach from the standpoint of the student 
either teaching it again or being directly and spe- 
cifically influenced by it in his teaching. If we 
teach sociology, that does not mean that we are 
attempting to prepare teachers of sociology, but only 
that some understanding of the principles of sociology 
is necessary to any one who would attempt to teach. 
If we teach biology, psychology, the principles of 
education, the administration of schools, the history 
of education, and kindred subjects, we do it for the 
same reason. Literature, every teacher of an elemen- 
tary school must teach, and to teach it should know 

Q 



226 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

it thoroughly enough to make others comprehend 
its purpose and get instruction, warning, and en- 
couragement from it. To teach the history of the 
United States the teacher should know that history 
deeply enough to comprehend how it began in "the 
greatest discovery ever made by man" twenty -five 
hundred years ago at Athens, how Roman law and 
order transplanted that discovery to western Europe, 
how church synods and church administration estab- 
lished it, as a model for our barbarian forefathers to 
follow, in the days of Theodore of Tarsus, and how 
century after century Englishmen fought for those 
English rights which were accorded them most 
grudgingly one by one, until at last they fought 
for them once more as Englishmen at Concord, 
Lexington, and Bunker Hill. 

Much is required of us to whom the fostering of 
the children of the nation is given. We must more 
than suspect the elements of our trade. We must 
master the human purpose which is at the heart of 
each of the great arts which are so invaluable that 
they must be begun in youth and continued through- 
out life. Our students must, while they are with us, 
attain a high degree of wise discerning skill, not in a 
single one of them, but in them all. And more than 
that — far more than that — they must become 
proficient shapers of the feelings, interests, and actions 
of men. We want an eight-hour day, a six-day week, 
and a twelve-month school year in which to do the 
work that you have asked us to do. We want the 
privilege here in this great city of organizing normal 
school classes at night so that young men and young 



OUR UNDERTAKING 227 

women of aspiration who must labor in the daytime 
for a livelihood shall have opened to them an oppor- 
tunity to fit themselves for the teacher's calling by 
harder effort than their more fortunate fellows put 
forth. We want to offer rich and varied courses of 
instruction bearing upon their work to the seven 
thousand five hundred teachers now in service in 
our schools. We want the privilege of training 
teachers more thoroughly for the elementary schools 
than you now allow us to train them. We want to 
extend our diploma course from two years to three 
years. We of this school are unanimous in that. 
And after our students have spent three years in 
addition to the four years of their high-school course 
in earning that license to teach, and have approved 
themselves by one or two years of teaching in the 
schools, we want to open a fourth year of professional 
study to them, and at its close we want to reward 
their effort with a professional degree. 

We ask the privilege of building up as good a 
teaching service in this dear land as now exists in 
other regions. There are twenty-four state teachers' 
colleges in other parts of our country. California 
has none as yet. We have no desire to enter into 
rivalry with its splendid university or with its 
score of colleges which do their work so well. We 
say to them : We will not harm your undertakings, 
we will help them, for the more vigorously education 
is fostered in a growing country, the more the country 
grows. 

I began by opposing to the statement of Nietzsche, 
** the education of the masses can not be our aim," the 



228 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

counterstatement that the education of the masses is 
our aim. I want to close by opposing to his other 
prophecy, "The time will come when men will 
think of nothing but education," the declaration of 
Professor Franklin, "The time has come when men 
must think of nothing but education." 



WHAT THE WAR IS TEACHING US ABOUT 

EDUCATION 

Organizing has been the order of the day every- 
where through this land ever smce April the second, 
1917. We organize to produce food and to save the 
food which has been produced. We organize to 
raise billions for the defense of our homes. We 
organize to create a citizen army and to rush it to 
Europe. The railroads were not equal to their 
task so long as they pursued each its own way. 
To make them more eflScient, the government welds 
them into a single organization. Ships must be 
had, millions of tons of ships, and to get them the 
Government creates a National Shipping Board with 
large powers of coercion and constraint. The 
manufacture of aeroplanes is directed by a single 
head. The making of guns and munitions is a 
coordinated undertaking. Prodigies of combined 
strength result, such as the world never knew before. 
We live in an era of mass effort. The bundle of 
sticks is unbreakable now that they are tied to- 
gether. We dare not go our several ways if we are 
to lift the load which we the people of the United 
States have shouldered. That load is even heavier 
than we think. It calls for systematic effort of 
more kinds than we have yet made. There is a 
eo5rdination of national strength by which Germany 

229 



230 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

through long years prepared herself for the dom- 
ination of the world and that, so thoroughly, that 
her plan almost succeeded. She mustered her 
schools. 

A little of that story is to be found in a volume 
which circulated freely before we entered the war. 
It does not circulate at all now, for it is a propagandist 
book devoted to making the worse appear the better 
cause. Its title is " Modern Germany." It is by "va- 
rious German writers, '* most of them professors in 
German universities. Professor Ernest Troeltsch 
of Berlin, for the enlightenment of the world, con- 
tributes a chapter, on the spirit of German Kultur, in 
the course of which he takes pains to say that "in 
Germany the school organization parallels that of 
the army; the public school corresponds to the 
popular army. The latter, as well as the former, was 
called into being during the first great rise of the 
coming German state in opposition to Napoleon. 
When Fichte, while the country was groaning under 
the Napoleonic yoke, considered the ways and means 
of resurrecting the German State, he advised the 
infusion of German culture into the mass of the 
people, through the creation of national primary 
schools along the lines laid down by Pestalozzi, 
which were to educate the children according to 
well-established methods, to mental independence, 
moral self-control and intellectual self-development. 
This program was actually adopted by the different 
German states, and developed during the last 
century into a comprehensive school system of 
elementary, secondary, and university education. 



WHAT THE WAR IS TEACHING US 231 

This has become the real formative factor of the 
German spirit." 

Those who have had the good fortune to read 
Professor Alexander's enlightening volume, " The 
Prussian Elementary Schools," know that fostering 
mental independence, moral self-control, and in- 
tellectual self-development was not the purpose of the 
German elementary schools. While it is true that 
they have been "the real formative factor of the 
German spirit," their effort has been to form that 
spirit to dependence, obedience, and intellectual 
slavery. *' The whole scheme of Prussian elementary 
education," says Professor Alexander, "is shaped 
with the express purpose of making ninety-five out 
of every hundred citizens subservient to the ruling 
house and to the state. . . ." "The Prussian ele- 
mentary school is the best in the world from the 
point of view of the upper classes of Germany. 
From the point of view of the lower classes, it is the 
worst system, for it takes from them all hope of 
improving their condition in life. The Prussian 
method of education has produced a people that 
moves as one man at the command of its King. The 
result is exactly the same as if one would take an 
infant and teach him only one word to be used in 
response to all situations — in Germany that word 
is Fatherland." 

The people's school is the agency through which 
that enslaving has taken place. The child enters it 
when he is six years of age. It is a free school, while 
the gymnasium and the university are not. The 
children of the upper class and of the ambitious 



232 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

middle class do not go to the volksschule. They 
enter a progymnasium. The child in the volksschule 
may leave it at the age of nine and enter a gymnasium 
class; if he does so, he can begin the study of the 
foreign languages which the Germans have erected 
into a wall to keep all but the students who are 
fortunate enough to be able to enter a gymnasium, 
a realschule, or a realgymnasium, out of contact 
with any form of higher instruction. They have not 
set up an educational ladder from the elementary 
school to the university. They have, instead, seen 
to it that the elementary school leads away from the 
university and prepares only for what their highly 
stratified caste system regards as inferior forms of 
service. It is a sinister device which they have 
invented to close the gateway to opportunity upon 
the child when he is only nine years of age ; and it is 
very nearly as effective in keeping the bulk of the 
people in mental vassalage as a system of slavery 
would be. Once in a while a child leaves the 
volksschule and is rerouted in his education, but that 
happens so rarely as to be only the exception which 
calls attention to the rigor of the rule. 

There are textbooks in the volksschule, but they 
are a subordinate feature of its life. Its instruction 
is given by the teacher who lectures or talks to the 
children and then calls them up, one after the other, 
to repeat what he has said to them. In a military 
nation there is a great advantage in this method, 
but it is not the advantage which some of our 
American educators thought they saw in it a few 
years ago when they contrasted our method of 



WHAT THE WAR IS TEACHING US 233 

instruction with it in the saying that '*the German 
teacher teaches, the American teacher hears lessons." 
The German teacher uses his method of the au- 
thoritative word in order to prepare his pupils for 
the commands of the drill sergeant, the lieutenant, 
and the captain. If they are habituated from in- 
fancy to the authority of the spoken word over every 
other authority, they will believe what is told them 
by their officers and by their makers of opinion, and 
books and newspapers will have little influence upon 
them, and that is the way the government wishes 
them brought up. They must depend on the man 
who is set over them. The teacher is the textbook, a 
"speaking textbook," as Professor Alexander puts 
it. Consequently inarticulate books do not mean 
the same to them as they do to American children. 
Some of us, in our ignorance, were foolish enough to 
think that if President Wilson's splendid statements 
of the purpose of the United States in taking up arms 
could be dropped in Germany by aeroplanes, the 
German people would read them and be moved to 
give attention to his words. Nothing could be more 
unlikely. They give attention to the voice of their 
superiors, not to what they read in print, for so they 
have been habituated from their earliest years. 
Prince Lichnowsky's remarkable disclosure that 
Germany alone was responsible for starting the war 
was widely printed throughout the empire. It had, 
we are told, practically no effect. 

In a German school everything is told them by the 
teacher and memorized by the pupils. They ask no 
questions. "I had visited over three hundred 



234 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

classes in the volksschulen in Prussia before I heard 
a question from a pupil or a request for an explanation 
of a question which had occurred to him," says 
Professor Alexander. What is it that is told them 
over and over again until they can believe nothing 
else because they have never heard anything else? 
In the classes in religion, that God, King, and country 
are equally sacred, and that the King must be obeyed 
no less reverently than God himself, for the King is 
the representative of God and has been appointed 
by God to rule his faithful people. In the history 
classes they listen to a fiery glorification of the great 
deeds of the puissant fatherland and by it are wrought 
to "a German attitude of mind." In literature, 
too,5,the pounding in of patriotism goes on and 
Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles, in fact, as 
well as in phrase, becomes the living purpose of the 
nation. They have all, with one accord, been 
brought up to contemplate their own greatness so 
exclusively that they believe themselves a peculiar 
people commissioned to rule over mankind. 

The question which has shaped itself in the mind 
of nearly every man and woman alive outside of 
Germany — How did the hochgeboren Germans bring 
it to pass that the masses of their countrymen, in the 
unholiest of causes, fed themselves willingly, yes, 
even gladly, to the guns ? — is answered : by their 
educational system. With the aid of the schools 
the leaders had but to will the kind of morality 
they wanted. They had but to say "evil be thou 
our good" to accomplish in the people the transfor- 
mation they desired. 



WHAT THE WAR IS TEACHING US 235 

In the light of such a demonstration of the nearly 
limitless power of education as Germany has afforded, 
does our duty to education remain the same as 
before the war ? Or, do we not face a new revelation 
of the power of this agency in human life? Ger- 
many, her protagonists tell us, rests upon two 
corner stones — the people's army and the people's 
schools. After this colossal demonstration no coun- 
try henceforth can regard these instruments of 
national well-being, or of national self-destruction, 
with indifference. They are the means, and the 
chief means, to the kind of existence which any 
nation may aim to have. Its aim, let us hope, will 
be different from that of Germany, but its means 
will remain the same. 

It is not surprising, therefore, that the people of 
the United States are bethinking themselves about 
schools and what is taught in them. They have 
been finding out what schools should mean and at 
the same time they have been finding out that they 
have not meant in the past what they should mean 
and must mean now. "The war crisis has disclosed 
to the nation, as no other event has, the strength 
and worth of the American school system . . . the 
emergencies and demands of war have laid bare 
certain weaknesses and shortcomings in the scope 
and character of pubHc education that now call for 
readjustment and reorganization." That is the 
reason for the vigorous effort which is being made to 
revitalize the National Education Association and 
that is the reason for its national campaign to con- 
vince the American people that the government of 



236 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

the United States must share with the states the 
responsibihty of providing the funds, the adminis- 
trative oversight, and the supervision necessary to 
Americanize our entire population, to bring some- 
thing Hke equal educational opportunity to the 
children of the several states, and to conserve and 
foster our national ideals with such thorough- 
going devotion that the unity and conscious pur- 
poses of this people may not fail. 

American teachers look with envy, not unmixed 
with self-condemnation, to the federated effort of 
their colleagues in France and the triumphal 
evidences of their united labors for the children of 
the Republic across the sea. They have set them- 
selves the task of making their National Association 
as representative and as powerful a body as the 
Association of French Teachers. 

They have called upon Congress to enact legis- 
lation to create a Department of Education with a 
Secretary of Education at its head, and to appro- 
priate $100,000,000 annually for Federal cooperation 
with the states in the encouragement and support 
of education. The specific duty of that department 
will be to cooperate with the states in the abolition of 
illiteracy, three-fortieths of the sum annually appro- 
priated to be used for that purpose; to coSperate 
with the states in the Americanization of immigrants ; 
three-fortieths of the sum annually appropriated to 
be used "to teach immigrants, ten years of age and 
over, the English language and the duties of citizen- 
ship, and to develop among them an appreciation 
of and respect for the civic and social institutions 



WHAT THE WAR IS TEACHING US 237 

of the United States." It is proposed to apportion 
these sums to the states in the proportions which 
their ilHterate and their foreign-born populations 
bear to the total illiterate and the total foreign-born 
population of the United States. Five-tenths of the 
sum annually appropriated is to be devoted to 
improving the public schools, below college grade, by 
extending school terms, now too brief for effective 
education, and stimulating state and local interest 
in improving, through better instruction, better 
grading, and consolidation, the work of the rural 
schools. Two-tenths of the annual appropriation 
is to be used in cooperating with the states in the 
promotion of physical education ; three- twentieths of 
the appropriation is to be used "to encourage a more 
nearly universal preparation of prospective teachers." 
This in outline is the American counterpart of the 
English Education Bill. Like that famous measure 
recently enacted into law by Parliament, it is intended 
to cure some of the glaring weaknesses which the war 
has revealed in our educational system. 

What were those weaknesses? Twenty-nine per 
cent of the young men examined in the first draft 
were found to be physically unfit for military service. 
Seven hundred thousand men, between twenty-one 
and thirty-one years of age, could not read or write 
any language and could not speak Enghsh. It is 
estimated that nearly 5,000,000 of our population 
are in that condition. Our knowledge of agriculture 
was found to be quite unequal to the demand put 
upon it at the beginning of the war. Knowledge of 
how to select and how to prepare food was another 



238 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

national deficiency. When our young men were 
assembled in the cantonments they had to be taught 
the songs of our country, for it was found that they 
did not know them. The speakers of the National 
Security League, who went from camp to camp to 
address them, report that in the early days they 
met a dead wall of lack of comprehension of the 
causes of the war. Here were the young men of the 
nation eager and anxious to undertake the task to 
which the government had called them, but quite 
unable, without special instruction, to understand 
what it was all about. Our knowledge of our own 
history and of the geography of the world was grossly 
inadequate. These are some of the proofs of a most 
unsatisfactory condition of education among us. But 
the most striking proof of all is the fact that it took our 
people nearly three years to discover that their security 
was menaced, that their liberties were in danger. The 
cry "Wake up, America!" which came across the 
seas fell upon too many unheeding ears. This 
time we have escaped destruction, thanks to the 
vigilance and the indomitable will of our allies; 
but it is a low order of intelligence which can not dis- 
cern danger before destruction is upon it, and one 
may well question whether a nation which is not more 
keenly self-protective than we were during the first 
two and a half years of the war is fitted to survive. 

One of the compelling lessons we have been taught 
is that children cannot safely discontinue their 
studies at the early age of fourteen years. Many, most 
of them, do and have done so in the past, but that only 
proves that we must not be so careless of their wel- 



WHAT THE WAR IS TEACHING US 239 

fare and the nation's welfare in the future. It is 
self-evident that young people can not attain sufficient 
knowledge or sufficient maturity of mental habits 
by the age of fourteen to last them through life. If 
their notions of what our country is for, of our own 
duty to it ; of our neighbors — the other countries 
of this world ; — if their skill with which they make 
their contribution to the good of the whole; and 
their day-by-day choosings which decide what the 
nation shall undertake and be, are of any concern 
at all, they merit a more serious training than the 
present brief period of compulsory instruction pro- 
vides. A world indifferent to its to-morrow paid but 
slight attention to the shaping of its future. That 
course led to disaster. It is now engaged in piecing 
together such elements of strength as still remain in 
the effort to build a more intelligent and enduring 
life than it has yet had. The British nation found 
itself compelled, in the midst of war, to lay a securer 
foundation for its national well-being in a re- 
organized educational system which provides for 
continuous instruction of the youth of the land up to 
the age of eighteen years. In France a similar re- 
organization of foundational instruction is proposed. 
The needs of the people of the United States are 
not less demanding. Never before has education 
been valued as it is to-day. Never have the schools 
been regarded with such solicitude by every class 
and kind of shaper of public opinion. Democracy 
is engaged in its final struggle with institutional autoc- 
racy. It is putting its age-long enemy under its 
feet. It is making the world safe for its own kind of 



240 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

life. But what will make democracy safe for the 
world ? Nothing but education. The pious wish for 
liberty will not bring it. The heartfelt prayer of 
hundreds of millions of souls for peace they must 
themselves answer. With the defeat and the utter 
overthrow of the Germans, the new Crusade has but 
begun. The schools must take up the struggle when 
the cannons cease. It is prophetic of the new order 
that the people of Jerusalem, as soon as their city 
had been recovered, began the erection of a Jewish 
university. 

Symbolic of the new demand which the world 
undertaking is making upon education was that 
remarkable series of patriotic demonstrations which 
the Committee on Education of the War Department 
ordered some five hundred and fifty colleges and 
schools to hold at one and the same moment through- 
out the entire United States on the morning of 
October first. At 12 o'clock in the Atlantic Coast 
states, 11 o'clock in the central states, 10 o'clock in 
the mountain states, and 9 o'clock in the Pacific 
Coast states, the members of the Students' Army 
Training Corps were, in every college of the land, 
assembled around the flagpole to raise the flag and, 
in nation-wide unison, no less real because one group 
did not hear the voice of its neighbor, to pledge alle- 
giance to it. "This day . . . will be remembered 
in American history," says the War Department in 
its general orders for the observance of that day. I 
know of no event which has ever taken place in 
our history of such significance that the government 
felt called upon to synchronize it and make it a 



WHAT THE WAR IS TEACHING US 241 

simultaneous action from one end of the nation to the 
other. On that occasion the national government 
felt such deep dependence upon the schools that it 
made the inception of their work a ceremony of 
such moment that the President of the United States 
addressed a special message to them. "The step 
you have taken," he said to the members of the 
Students' Army Training Corps, "is a most signifi- 
cant one. By it you have ceased to be merely 
individuals, each seeking to perfect himself to win 
his own place in the world, and have become com- 
rades in the common cause of making the world a 
better place to hve in. You have joined yourselves 
with the entire manhood of the country and pledged 
as did your forefathers, your lives, your fortunes 
and your sacred honor to the freedom of humanity. 
The enterprise upon which you have embarked is a 
hazardous and diflScult one. This is not a war of 
words ; this is not a scholastic struggle. It is a war 
of ideals, yet fought with all the devices of science 
and with the power of machines. To succeed you 
must not only be inspired by the ideals for which 
this country stands, but you must also be masters of 
the technique with which the battle is fought. You 
must not only be thrilled with zeal for the common 
welfare, but you must also be masters of the weapons 
of to-day. There can be no doubt of the issue. The 
spirit that is revealed and the manner in which 
America has responded to the call is indomitable. 
I have no doubt that you, too, will use your utmost 
strength to maintain that spirit and to carry it for- 
ward to final victory that will certainly be ours." 



242 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

Substitute the word tools for weapons and this 
statement of the President becomes a perfect outline 
of the aim of education in the years which are to 
come after the war is ended. 

The Students' Army Training Corps was created 
by express direction of the President under the 
authority of the Act of Congress which authorized 
him to "increase temporarily the military establish- 
ment of the United States." It was intended to hasten 
the mobilization and training of the new armies by 
bringing men into training before their numbers 
would normally be reached by the draft boards and 
by providing an opportunity to carefully rate and 
test the fitness of the individual members of the 
corps for assignment to central officers' training 
schools or non-commissioned officers' training camps 
or for further technical training. The instruction was 
to be specific and highly intensive. Its intent was to 
meet the needs of the war program which are imme- 
diate and pressing. The course of study, as outlined 
by the War Department, called for eleven hours per 
week of practical and theoretical military instruction 
and physical training, and forty-two hours per week 
of class work and supervised study of allied subjects, 
the allied subjects to be selected from the following 
list : English, French, German, Mathematics, Phys- 
ics, Chemistry, Biology, Geology, Geography, Topog- 
raphy and Map-making, Meteorology, Astronomy, 
Hygiene, Sanitation, Descriptive Geometry, 
Mechanical and Freehand Drawing, Surveying, 
Economics, Accounting, International Law, Military 
Law, Government, and Psychology. One subject. 



WHAT THE WAR IS TEACHING US 243 

but not more than one subject, could be chosen out- 
side this Hst. College presidents were instructed to 
make it clear to their students that success in winning 
a commission depended upon their demonstrated 
ability and the needs of the service. 

The War Department announced its intention to 
fill the places of students who were withdrawn for 
assignment to other organizations with recruits 
selected for ability and maturity by army rating 
methods and army examining boards, without ex- 
plicit reference to the usual college entrance examina- 
tions and ordinary academic rating systems. 

Here was a colossal nation-wide educational experi- 
ment whose results are certain to permanently affect 
established practices in most of the colleges of the 
United States. Mr. Elihu Root, in addressing the 
assembled Students' Army Training Corps at Colum- 
bia University, said to them : "A new era begins in 
which all the learning of America is now laid upon 
the altar of service. . . . No one can measure, no 
one can conceive what it will mean in future years 
that you and the 150,000 other college and university 
students and all the learned faculty and all the alumni 
and all the Americans whose hearts are full of pride 
and hope in American education unite in concentrat- 
ing military power and capacity and promise for the 
future in one pledge of sacred and unforgetable 
service to our country." The experiment did not 
come to fruition. The armistice was signed before 
it was well begun, but the change it introduced into 
American higher education was significant and not 
without its permanent results. 



EDUCATION BY IMMEDIATE OBJECTIVES 

Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Azan, in his monu- 
mental volume, "The Warfare of To-day," makes 
learning how the first step in the waging of war. The 
whole nation must be put to school. The infantry- 
men, the artillerymen, the aviators, the engineers, the 
cavalrymen, the medical arm, the quartermaster's 
corps, the railwaymen, the motor transport service, 
the intelligence department, the topographic branch, 
the ammunition makers, the ordnance makers, the 
shipbuilders, the maritime transport men, the 
convoy, the farmers, the merchants, the bankers, 
the manufacturers, in short, the entire population, 
must be taught, individual by individual, to take 
its place in the line or behind the line and perform its 
work of saving, consuming and producing the goods 
which are needed, be they merely self-denial, collab- 
orating confidence, provision for the soldiers' 
dependents, assistance in conscripting and preparing 
the forces, shoes, clothing, arms, all the multifarious 
requirements, not of an army, but of a nation in arms. 
Two great principles, he believes, dominate the 
process of education thus set afoot : specialization 
and coordination. All must be trained; his dis- 
cussion concerns only the combatants. 

"The basis of organization for training rests upon 
certain extremely simple principles, so simple in 

244 



EDUCATION BY IMMEDIATE OBJECTIVES 245 

fact that they seem almost self-evident. Yet, as a 
matter of fact, they have been misunderstood in the 
past and still are misunderstood to-day. They are 
the following: 

1. No army can be trained without teachers. 

2. The teachers must be trained before the troops 
can be. 

3. To train these teachers there must be schools 
for officers of all arms. 

4. To organize these schools it is necessary to 
bring together the officers best qualified to give 
instruction. 

" . . . . No army can he trained without teachers. 
This principle is evident; why is it so often mis- 
understood? The people who misunderstand it are 
in error as to the meaning of the word 'training.' 
Training, to their minds, means drill in bodily move- 
ments and attitudes, marches and alignments, 
rifle practice and bayonet exercises, etc. A knowl- 
edge of these things is supposed to be enough to 
make a trained soldier. This mistake has been made 
in every army by those who believed that the 
mihtary profession consisted in the accomplishment 
of certain rites, and not in the apprenticeship for 
war. Teachers whose knowledge did not extend 
beyond these rites could teach nothing more to the 
officers and soldiers confined to their care; such 
teachers are quite incapable of teaching modern 
warfare. This is the idea which so many of my 
friends have misunderstood when they have asked 
me : * How long a time do you think is needful to 
train an officer?' I have invariably replied: *A 



246 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

few months if he is intelligent and put under the 
care of a competent teacher ; a year, eighteen months, 
or two years if his teacher is mediocre ; and, in the 
latter case, all that he will accomplish will be to lead 
his men to be slaughtered." ^ 

Not very long ago the whole world believed that 
a soldier could not be trained in less than two, or 
perhaps even'three, years ; at least, that he could not 
be trained in a shorter time to meet and withstand 
the onslaught of a thoroughly disciplined army such 
as the German troops were. America has been 
giving herseK a new notion of her own resourcefulness 
and ability in the last eighteen months, and at the 
same time she has been giving herself a new notion 
of training. The ritualistic conception of warfare, 
she has discarded, and the ritualistic conception of 
training for warfare; and with that goes, as it is 
bound to go, the ritualistic conception of education 
of all sorts. Never before have the youth of the 
land had a chance to show what they could do under 
favorable conditions. Never before have they been 
able to break away from routinary prescriptions of 
content, hours, methods, and subject matter. Our 
universities and colleges, with their traditions of 
learning made in Germany and many of their pro- 
fessors trained there, set up before them so many 
blind absolutes demanding devotion that it was not 
until Germany herself forced us to it that we had the 
temerity to break away from the intellectual ritualism 
which she had spun. Absolutism in learning is no 
more defensible than absolutism in government. 

1 Azan : " The Warfare of To-day," pp. 53-54, Houghton Mifflin Co. 



EDUCATION BY IMMEDIATE OBJECTIVES 247 

They grew up together — the soldier for his Kaiser, 
the citizen for his state, the musician for his art, 
the scholar for his science, all perverted humans 
who insist upon reversing the real relations of life 
and doing their utmost to turn bread into a stone. 
If we had been really critical, we would not have 
needed the war to teach us that German in- 
tellectualism, with its adorations and its scholastic 
rites, is as little like the genuine training which 
democratic intelligence demands as the formal but 
king-glorifying labor of the Alexandrians was like 
the genuine search for knowledge of the democratic 
Athenians. Just as German lower education had 
Kaiserism for its object, so German higher education 
had the ornamentation of the empire, rather than 
service to the citizens, for its aim. It studied the 
classics, but not for the sake of their humanity ; it 
studied psychology, but only to forget the imponder- 
ables, the consideration of which is the chief reason 
for studying psychology; it studied religion only 
as a series of ignoble and regrettable human failings 
and then proceeded to make a religion of its own more 
cruel and inhuman than any which its study had 
unearthed. It studied ethics only to discover that 
morality is the will of the stronger. It studied inter- 
national law only to put itself outside the pale of 
international law. History to it meant the 
glorification of the deeds of the German nation; 
philosophy, the identification of the absolute with 
the German spirit. The conclusion of all its in- 
struction is that the state is God on earth. Of co- 
ordination of effort, there was enough there and to 



248 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

spare. Every science contributed its share to the 
demonstration of the ineffable, all-glorious empire. 
All roads led to that result, for of specialization, of 
patient consulting of facts and following where 
they led, there was very little. Of training for war, 
there was more than enough; but of training for 
humanity, there was none, though they did much 
that to an uncritical world passed for that. Such 
results as were attained were not possible save to a 
learning that has become a rite. 

Germany's example has become a warning to the 
world. The classics have other uses to serve than 
those of German philologie. Psychology is something 
more than a minute tabulation of the infinitely com- 
plex traits of human beings; religion is something 
other than a curious chapter in the natural history 
of man; duty or justice is not "a lofty Presence 
transcending all considerations of expediency." In- 
ternational law is more than a body of historic docu- 
ments ; history is not a record of chauvinistic triumphs, 
while philosophy is something other than the march of 
God to Prussia. An academic system that allowed such 
attitudes to be engendered, such convictions to be 
formed as those which have characterized the in- 
tellectuals of Germany in the last half dozen years 
did not consult, employ, or comprehend the wisdom 
of the ages or the experience of mankind. German 
higher education, therefore, has to be explained. 
That devotion to learning could have led to such 
a result is unthinkable. The result is there. It 
could not have been anything but a camouflage of 
learning which produced it, and if that method of 



EDUCATION BY IMMEDIATE OBJECTIVES ^9 

studying is a camouflage of sinister import, it must 
be abandoned and a more productive method must 
take its place. Never again can the world admit 
that education is occupation with the sciences after 
the German fashion. Never again can it put its 
trust in a blind ritualism of lectures, readings, and 
examinations, upon preordained subjects which are 
to be approached without consideration of con- 
sequences. The German attitude toward learning 
and the method which it employed are wrong. 
There is another method, the product of a wholly 
different attitude. 

"In war," writes Ferdinand Foch, "there is but 
one manner of considering every question ; that is 
the objective manner. War is not an art of pleasure 
or sport, indulged in without other reason as one 
might go in for painting, music, hunting, or tennis 
which can be taken up or stopped at will. In war 
everything is correlated. Every move has some 
reason, seeks some object; once that object is 
determined it decides the nature and the importance 
of the means to be employed. The object in every 
case is the answer to the question which faced 
Verdy du Vernois as he reached the field of battle 
at Nachod. 

"ReaHzing the difficulties to be overcome, he 
seeks in vain through his memory for an example 
or a principle which will show him what to do. No 
inspiration comes. *To the devil,' says he, *with 
history and principles ! After all, what is my 
objective?' And his mind is immediately made 
up. Such is the objective manner of handling a 



250 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

problem. A move is considered in relation to the 
objective in the widest sense of the word : what is 

THE OBJECTIVE? 

"This similar manner of considering questions 
and of understanding them causes a similar manner 
of action. But what follows is an unrestricted 
application of every means to the objective sought. 
The habit once formed of studying and acting on 
many specific cases, it will be instinctively and 
almost unconsciously that the work is done. Verdy 
du Vernois is an instance. *To the devil,' says he, 
'with history and principles,' yet he makes use of 
his knowledge of history and principles; without 
training along such lines, without the acquired 
habit of reasoning and deciding he would have been 
unable to face a difficult situation. . . . 

"We must first understand truths and, therefore, 
have an open mind, without prejudice, ready-made 
ideas, or theories blindly accepted merely because they 
rest on tradition. One standard alone, that of 
reason. Then we must apply these truths to specific 
cases, on the map at first, on the ground later, the 
battlefield ultimately. Let us not look for similar- 
ities, let us not appeal to our memory, it would desert 
us at the first cannon shot, and let us avoid all charts 
or formulse. We wish to reach the field with a 
trained power of judgment; it only needs to have 
us train it, to have us begin training it to-day. Let 
us for that purpose seek the reason of things ; that 
will show us how to use them. 

"It will be necessary, finally, to employ un- 
consciously some truths. For that purpose they 



EDUCATION BY IMMEDIATE OBJECTIVES 251 

must be so familiar to us as to have entered into 
our bones, to be a component part of ourselves. 

"Those are happy who are born believers, but they 
are not numerous. Neither is a man born learned or 
born muscular. Each one of us must build up his 
faith, his beliefs, his knowledge, his muscles. Results 
will not spring from any sudden revelation or light, 
as by a stroke of lightning. We can only attain 
them through a continued effort at understanding, 
at assimilation. Do not the simplest of arts make 
the same requirements ? Who would expect to learn 
in a few moments or even in a few lessons, to ride, 

"You will be asked later to be the brains of an 
army ; I say unto you to-day : Learn to think. In 
the presence of every question considered independ- 
ently and by itself ask yourself first : What is the 
objective? That is the first step toward the state 
of mind to be attained ; that is the direction sought, 
purely objective."^ These are the golden words of a 
master whose theory has met the pragmatic test. 

The scientist works by objectives. He does not 
investigate in general. Francis Bacon's advice to 
him to collect facts and go on collecting facts until 
the dead weight of their identities or their differences 
revealed principles and laws has never been success- 
fully applied. Nature answers the questions which 
men ask her. She makes no revelations to them 
who do not carefully frame the questions whose 
answer they seek. The process of scientific dis- 

^Foch: "The Principles of War," translated by De Morinni, pp. 17, 
18, 22, 23. The H. K. Fly Co., N. Y. 



252 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

covery has been immensely fruitful because it has 
been preceded by painfully exact consideration of the 
kind of knowledge which is sought and the conditions 
which must be used to put the matter of the specific 
inquiry to the test. The broadside method of 
attack had to be abandoned before the real dis- 
coveries of a genuine science could begin. 

The example of the inventor is equally directive. 
He does not look in general or search by wholesale. 
He starts with a problem, a fairly definite and con- 
crete problem, and little by little he puzzles out its 
solution. Scientific management proceeds in the 
same fashion. We need a whole new literature of 
method to put these more refined, more fruitful 
ways of going to work at the disposal of every one. 

The thing that America has learned about training 
is that it, too, must have an objective. The miracle 
which she has performed of putting a well-prepared 
and most effective fighting force of two million 
men into the trenches within eighteen months of her 
entry into the war is due to the fact that she took 
Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Azan's advice to heart 
and followed it. The old-time ritualistic training for 
war would have gotten her nowhere. The process 
had to be speeded up and it had to be made as definite 
as it could be. Schools were organized for intensive 
training in each of the different kinds of arms. 
Groups of French and English officers were sent to 
each cantonment: the EngHsh to train instructors 
in ^ve specialties, the machine gun, the light trench 
mortar, the use of the bayonet, liquid fire and gas 
warfare, and sniping ; the French to give instruction 



EDUCATION BY IMMEDIATE OBJECTIVES 253 

in the use of artillery, the machine rifle, grenades, 
sapping, and liaison service. This instruction began 
at the top, the first consideration being to train 
military instructors who in turn trained the new 
officers, v/ho in turn trained the men. 

Any one who has been privileged to visit a ground 
school where prospective aviators are being prepared 
by a three months' course to enter the flying school 
will not soon forget how hard they work and what 
rapid progress they make in their studies. The 
mathematics and the mechanics of their craft, 
the assembling and care of their machines, the mili- 
tary lessons, and the physical training which they 
take are all speeded up to the highest pitch of 
intensity. There is no idling anywhere, and when 
free time comes on Saturday at noon the men on their 
own initiative form themselves into quiz classes and 
take refuge in the private rooms of the nearest hotel 
in order to go over together, in little groups, the 
work of the week which their instructors have just 
given them. 

A system of instruction in rifle shooting developed 
by the Second Battalion, 14th U. S. Infantry, is 
based upon the conviction that every man can learn 
to shoot. It omits everything which is not essential 
to making the soldier a good shot. The preliminary 
training covers one week of intensive work. There 
are four distinct steps : first, sighting and aiming ; 
second, positions ; third, the trigger squeeze ; fourth, 
rapid fire. Each step starts with a lecture and 
demonstrations by an instructor to the assembled 
command, but every individual who hears it must 



254 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

understand each point which is made and explain 
it in his own words. Blank forms are supplied to each 
squad leader upon which the record of every man's 
proficiency in each of the essential points is kept. 
Exactness in details is demanded. "There is no such 
thing as a sight that is about right ; it is either abso- 
lutely right or it is all wrong." The essentials of good 
shooting are three — correct aiming, correct position, 
correct trigger-squeeze. Rapid firing calls, in addi- 
tion, for correct loading from the clip, correct work- 
ing of the bolt, and the persistent keeping of the eye 
upon the target while working the bolt. A man who 
is learning to shoot must have a coach beside him to 
point out his errors. The coach must watch what the 
man does — the right eye of the man — not the tar- 
get or "he might as well not be there at all." The 
course of instruction has two parts, the preparatory 
exercises and range practice. The handbook deals 
only with the preparatory exercises, "because this is 
the period of training during which the man learns 
everything necessary to become a good shot." 

Another illustration of the method of training by 
immediate objectives I take from the experience of the 
Committee on Education and Special Training of the 
War Department in preparing men for the motor 
transport service of the United States army. The 
training which was given the motor transport per- 
sonnel at first was subdivided into courses for 
mechanics, courses for repair men, and courses for 
drivers. This was found to be unsatisfactory be- 

* " Individual Instruction in Rifle Practice," by Lieut.-Col. A. J. 
McNab, Jr., U. S. A. Cincinnati, Stewart & Kidd Co., 1918. 



EDUCATION BY IMMEDIATE OBJECTIVES 255 

cause it did not produce the expert service which 
was demanded. A Hst of the most important 
mechanical occupations of the motor transport 
service in the order of their importance, as deter- 
mined by the demand which the army made for men 
trained in them, was then compiled. It ran : Auto 
Driver, Truck Driver, Auto Repairer-General, Auto 
Repairer-Chassis, Auto Repairer-Engine Assembler, 
Auto Repairer-Axle and Transmission Assembler, 
Auto Repairer-Truck Body, Electrician-Magneto 
and Ignition Expert, Electrician-Automobile General, 
Tire Repairer-Rubber, Motorcycle Repairer Expert, 
Auto Repairer-Radiator, Auto Repairer-Carburetor, 
Wheelwright etc. 

As trained specialists of these several kinds were 
urgently demanded, the schools which were endeavor- 
ing to train fighting mechanics were urged to 
specialize their courses, focusing the training of each 
man upon the particular service which he was to 
render. That did not mean that they were to 
endeavor to make him a narrow specialist. The 
man who knew more of ignition than of engine or 
rear axle assembling was not given instruction in 
ignition alone. He was given that, but in addition 
he was trained as a soldier and given a course in the 
origin and aims of the war ; but his military training 
and his course in war aims were just as specific as 
his instruction in ignition was. 

Illustrations might be multiplied indefinitely. 
One could take them from every branch and depart- 
ment of the army. They constitute indeed a new type 
of education. Even the college courses for Section 



^56 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

A of the Students' Army Training Corps were made 
over by the Committee on Education and given a 
form hardly less definite and specific than the in- 
struction which it prescribed for the vocational 
training of the men of Section B. The improvement 
in method is significant. As a people we have made 
an experiment demonstrating the superiority of 
working by purposes to every other form of working 
— an educational experiment of such import that 
we can never go back to the old aimlessness of other 
days. Henceforth we are in a position to say with 
Verdy du Vernois whenever we are invited to study 
history, or literature, or languages, or mathematics, 
or science, or art, or philosophy, just as history, or 
literature, or language, or mathematics, or science 
or art, or philosophy, "To the devil with them! 
What is my objective ? " That, after all, is the great 
lesson of the war. That is the thing which democ- 
racy is, life in pursuit of objectives; while autoc- 
racy, with all its works and trappings of which Ger- 
man education in whatever country it may have 
found an echo is one, is life without objectives, life 
arbitrarily determined, handed down, prearranged 
without reasons or purposes, life held in place by 
force, brute force, forever at war with intelligent 
human objectives. 

There is need of reconstruction in American edu- 
cation to meet this requirement. It has not been a 
clear-sighted striving for definitely valuable objec- 
tives. It has hardly set before itself the object of 
training young people to use the humanly valuable 
activities about which books are written and studied. 



EDUCATION BY IMMEDIATE OBJECTIVES 257 

It has been content if they learned from their text- 
books the definitions, descriptions, and rules which 
supplied a brief knowledge about these activities, 
but little or no knowledge of them. It has not 
thought of the study of physics as undertaken to 
teach folks how to take hold of, and lift and shove the 
material masses which they must move out of their 
way as they go about this planet. It has not 
regarded mathematics as a device for calculating 
strains and tensions, the curves of projectiles, and 
the course of ether waves. It has thought of it 
instead as a cross section of eternal truth. It has 
not concerned itself so much with the lessons of 
history as with the completeness of the record. 
It has studied literature as a painstaking research 
into minor matters rather than as an indispensable 
shaper of human loves and hates. It has studied 
language as illustrations of philologie. Civics or 
government was a pretty impersonal account of the 
arrangements which somehow or other had gotten 
themselves written down in books, rather than a 
vivid story of the efforts of the human herds 
which had produced them to live together by their 
means. 

In short, the trouble with American education in 
the past has been its intellectualism. It has regarded 
knowledge as a description of reality, not as a guide 
to the shaping of reality. It has treated, or at least 
tended to treat, the human mind as a mirror of 
existence rather than an enginery of intentions, aims 
and purposes. In this great day when no existence, 
not even our own, is of concern to us save as it 



258 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

aids or thwarts the intentions toward which we 
strive, we commit ourselves to a new philosophy. 
The gathering of descriptions, the amassing of facts, 
the acquiring of knowledge about the things which 
are, can not any longer be our main business. That 
is too indefinite a task, for existences are infinite 
and the getting of knowledge about them is a never- 
ending undertaking. We must have a principle by 
which to select the important from the unimportant. 
WTiat things are essential ? we ask. And the War 
Department answers by telling us what kind of 
French or German or English or mathematics or 
geography will help in the effort to augment the 
nation's strength. Shall we, when the war is over, 
go back to the old ritualism of studying French or 
German or English or mathematics or geography, 
merely as a tale that is told, or shall we continue to 
treat these studies as means to objectives? It is 
no more likely that education will ever again be the 
aimless series of rites that it formerly was than that 
agriculture or railroading or military science will 
forget the lessons of the war. 

It is time, therefore, and high time, for an active 
reconstruction of the foundations of instruction. 
All schools must share in it. But upon the elemen- 
tary schools the obligation is particularly heavy as 
they immediately concern the welfare of all. The 
emergency in education calls for monetary aid, for 
administrative improvements, for better school- 
houses, more days of instruction per year and larger 
numbers of trained teachers. Needed they all are, 
but the greatest need is the elimination of ritualistic 



EDUCATION BY IMMEDIATE OBJECTIVES 259 

learning through the remaking of the studies which 
are taught in the schools. School teachers have 
been urged for years to omit the useless sections and 
the useless problems of arithmetic from their study 
of that subject. President Francis A. Walker of the 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology began that 
crusade in 1887. He declared that **a false arith- 
metic has grown up which has largely crowded out 
the place of the true arithmetic. . . . The most 
jagged fractions such as would hardly ever be found 
in actual business operations, e.g.y ^ or |t> are piled 
one on top of another, to produce an unreal and im- 
possible difficulty ; and the child, having been 
furnished with such an arithmetical monstrosity, is 
set to multiplying or dividing it by another * com- 
pound and complex fraction ' as unreal and ridiculous 
as itself. All this sort of thing in the teaching of 
young children is either useless or mischievous. . . . 
The charge I make against the existing course of 
study is that it is largely made up of exercises which 
are not exercises in arithmetic at all, or principally, 
but are exercises in logic, and, secondly, that as 
exercises in logic, these are either useless or mis- 
chievous. . . . Generally, if not universally, speak- 
ing, whatever in education is hard, is wrong." Many 
years have gone by since that reform began. Im- 
provement has taken place here and there, but the 
arithmetic which is taught is still for the most part 
the traditional thing which Dr. Walker found so 
meaningless. 

Improvement there has been, too, in the teaching 
of spelling, though it is not generally registered in 



260 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

spelling books or found in the bulk of classes engaged 
in studying spelling. The prevailing notion seems 
still to be that children are taught to spell in order 
that they may know how to spell the words in the 
English language. That there are more words in 
the language than they can ever hope to master, 
and that they will have occasion in life to spell only 
a very few of them, does not seem to guide in the 
selection of the words which are included in their 
lessons. It ought to determine those lessons, for the 
question : What words do folks have occasion to spell 
when they write ? has been submitted to very pains- 
taking and fruitful investigation in recent years. 

Our study of geography has left us woefully un- 
informed concerning many of the things which all 
of us should know if public opinion in the United 
States is to keep our national house in order. For 
example, Mexico is our neighbor and we must at 
least know enough of her to form an intelligent judg- 
ment of our country's duty in the several relations 
with her which arise. But how many of our people 
have a sufficient knowledge of Mexico to form an 
intelligent opinion about her.^^ Perhaps one in ten 
thousand. We have a neighbor to the West, a great, 
proud, capable, and splendid neighbor. We must 
keep the peace and live in mutual helpfulness with 
her. But how many of our people know enough of 
Japan to maintain an informed opinion concerning 
heT? It was the same with Germany, France, 
Italy, and even England, before the war. We did 
not know our neighbors, yet that knowledge is a 
matter of life or death to us. We study geography ; 



EDUCATION BY IMMEDIATE OBJECTIVES 261 

but we do not seem to pick out the facts which are 
presented with sufficient care. Because we do not 
organize our teaching, the children do not organize 
their learning. The net result is very disappointing. 
It is much the same with history, so much is taught 
and so little is chosen for its significance that little 
of value comes from that study. The National 
Security League believes, and has good reason to 
believe, that the teaching of civics should be re- 
formed. It is experimenting to find out how that 
may be done. What is true of these studies is 
equally true of the twelve or thirteen other subjects 
which are taught in American elementary schools. 
They should be made over, reconstructed, in the light 
of the nation's new knowledge of what training is. 
Here and there, a teacher more discontented than 
his fellows, has for years been asking himself the 
questions : What is arithmetic for ? Why do we 
study spelling ? What is our aim in teaching civics ? 
Why is American history taught.^ What is our 
uppermost purpose in teaching geography? The 
number of folks who have been forced by the per- 
sistence of their own active minds to find answers to 
these questions is not by any means so great as is 
the number which has asked them. They are the 
most profitable questions which teachers can ask, 
for, if we take them seriously enough, they will 
commit us to the view that teaching is not indeed the 
unwinding, link by link, of a chain which was forged 
in the past, but a purposive undertaking which 
proceeds or, rather, should proceed, only by clearly 
conceived objectives. Thinkers not a few have 



262 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

known that all along. Their efforts to convert their 
fellows have been persistent. The literature which 
they have contributed is extensive, yet the new 
method of attack does not find general acceptance. 
Routinary aimlessness still obtains. The children go 
through the textbooks from cover to cover. They do 
not learn to distinguish the important from the less 
important and the relatively unimportant. Even 
though the course of study be written from the new 
standpoint and the reports of the Committee on the 
Economy of Time in Instruction pile up the reasons 
for rejecting much that the books contain, our prac- 
tice lags far behind our theory. How can that 
diflficulty be overcome ? 

There is, I believe, only one way. The teachers 
themselves must make the course of study. If any 
one else prepares it, they will not be able to make full 
use of it. If they prepare it themselves, it is their 
own plan of campaign which they can not disregard 
even though they find it difficult to carry it out. 
I know a group of superintendents of schools who 
decided a year ago, under the stress and stimulus of 
the time, that waste was as intolerable in schools 
as in kitchens or dining rooms, that they therefore 
would do what they could to take advantage of the 
universal eagerness for improvement and would make 
over the instruction in their schools so as to eliminate 
waste as completely as they could. They resolved 
to reconstruct the courses of study in the schools of 
their region and banded themselves together to do 
so. "Our object," they said, "is to attempt through 
the labors of a series of carefully selected committees to 



EDUCATION BY IMMEDIATE OBJECTIVES 263 

clearly define the purpose which should regulate the 
teaching of each of the several elementary school 
studies, and in accordance with that purpose to 
reduce each of these studies to its lowest terms by 
eliminating all lessons and parts of lessons which do 
not specifically contribute to that purpose, and to 
study the best ways and means of attaining that pur- 
pose in the teaching of each subject." They created 
a series of committees, one to examine and report 
upon each of the studies in the elementary course. 
Each superintendent appointed the best teacher, or 
the best two or three teachers of that subject 
in his company to work on that committee. When 
they came together there were some eighteen com- 
mittees with ten or more members each. The 
superintendents said to them: "We have called 
you together to ask you to study and to answer four 
questions which vitally affect the schools of this 
state. The first question is : What is your subject 
for ? What is its aim ? What is its purpose ? The 
second question, which must be answered in the light 
of the first, is : What are the essentials of your 
subject? What parts of it are of first-rate im- 
portance, as distinguished from the aspects of it 
which are only of second-rate or third-rate value? 
We want you to skeletonize your subject so that we 
shall have a course of study which will be made up 
of minimum essentials. These two questions we want 
you to answer in your first report. The ques- 
tion, how a subject shall be taught, ought not to 
determine what should be taught. Subjects should 
be taught for other reasons than the traditional 



264 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

demands of pedagogical method. After you have 
decided why your several subjects should be taught 
and what parts of them are essential to that objective, 
you will next undertake to answer a third question : 
What in the light of its purpose and of its content is 
the best method to teach your subject? And, 
fourth : WThat tests are there by which you can 
determine whether or not it is being mastered success- 
fully?" 

These committees of working teachers were urged 
to master the literature which deals with the aims, 
essentials, and methods of their subject. Their 
fellow teachers in their group of schools collaborated 
with them. The committees met at intervals 
throughout the year. Each committee presented its 
answers to the first two questions. These reports 
were studied, line by line, by the superintendents and 
referred back to the committees for revision. That 
work is still going on, but already a new spirit has 
entered the schools of their part of the state. Educa- 
tion by objectives has taken the place of education by 
meaningless routine. So confident are the superin- 
tendents of the cities which the committees rep- 
resent that results of value are coming from their 
deliberations, that they have formed themselves into 
a league of school systems to use the committee- 
made course of study and henceforth to conduct 
their common business cooperatively. 

Man is a working animal. He works instinctively 
and by habit. Usually he perceives the meaning of 
his work only dimly. He is but one of many in 
a great enterprise, and the service which that enter- 



EDUCATION BY IMMEDIATE OBJECTIVES 265 

prise renders he finds somewhat too remote to be 
clearly imaged. It is only in moments of great 
stress, like the present, that he is able to exchange 
his blind fidelities for conscious awareness of aims 
and reasons. While the stress endures, he can live 
purposively. When it is over he may sink down into 
a humdrum existence again. But education should 
never be a humdrum matter. It is its privilege 
always to be concerned with aims and to proceed 
at every step by objectives. The reorganization of 
which we have spoken is only a beginning. There 
must be a reason why young people should study 
arithmetic and geography and history. That reason, 
if we could find it, would tell us at once what arith- 
metic and geography and history they should study 
and would tell us quite as conclusively how they 
should study it. Our first duty, therefore, is to 
study our aim in teaching each of the subjects which 
we invite the young to study. But having found 
what our aim is, we have made only a beginning. 
Just as certainly as we teach geography for one pur- 
pose and history for another, just so certainly should 
our aim in teaching to-day's lesson in geography 
be different from our aim in teaching to-morrow's 
lesson. In genuine learning there is no such thing 
as mere repetition. There must be something new 
to be done each day, some new point to be attacked, 
some new objective to be reached. Children are no 
more content than adults to mark time. Their 
active nature longs to go forward, to add to-day's 
conquest to yesterday's gain. They are content to 
study English or geography or history for years 



266 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

provided that each day's Enghsh or geography or 
history be not an aimless rehashing of that which was 
studied yesterday or last week or last year. Now, 
most of our courses of study do not provide specific 
lessons which offer daily gains. They invite us to 
take the same subject over and over again until we 
have attained a kind of routine familiarity with it 
instead of planning our attack upon it so that we 
master first this aspect of it, then that, then the 
other, and in due course have mastered all. Educa- 
tion by immediate objectives will set a new problem 
for each day. It will break up each subject of in- 
struction into its constituent parts and arrange those 
parts in a progressive series. It will begin with a 
discussion of what it is that the student is to learn 
to do in his studying of that particular subject. 
It will next inform him what it is he is to learn to do 
in connection with each of its grand divisions. 
When the ground has been properly charted, he will 
be invited to begin a series of daily doings each 
different from that which preceded it and each 
suflficiently exacting to impart the sense of a new 
undertaking as he contemplates it and a new accom- 
plishment as he leaves it to take up the next day's 
problem. Only by seeing to it that each lesson 
provides its unique demand for skill, calls forth a new 
effort and means a step forward, can desultory 
school work with its motivation-destroying and 
interest-killing effects be banished. Only immediate 
objectives make intensive training possible. Going 
forward twenty lines in advance in translation or 
fifty map questions or a dozen examples is humdrum 



EDUCATION BY IMMEDIATE OBJECTIVES 267 

work, but looking forward to a new argument to be 
untangled, a new country to be examined, or a new 
principle to be applied, offers opportunity to show 
one's strength and to add to one's achievement. 

Let no one object that this method of specific 
attack applies only to practical studies. It applies 
to all studies which have any definite lessons for the 
young or for the old to learn. It banishes nothing 
which has either organized or organizable worth from 
any curriculum. It banishes subject worship and 
the practice of keeping just any kind of company with 
studies, and substitutes, for the slothfulness of 
believing that so long as we are in their presence a 
certain portion of our waking lives that somehow or 
other they will do us good, the conviction that it is 
what we learn to do with them, rather than what 
they do to us, that counts. 

There is one other corollary. With intensive labor, 
wasted years are saved. Not only is the work of 
education better done and the student better trained, 
but the long-drawn-out process is shortened. The 
finality of the time standard as a measure of educa- 
tion was discredited for all coming days when an 
American army, prepared in one year, destroyed the 
military prowess which Germany had labored for 
fifty years to attain. "They are men," said Ferdi- 
nand Foch, their Commander-in-Chief, "who do not 
know fear but know obedience, and are led by 
officers who may be counted upon." Is it not 
possible, while the methods of this huge world- 
convincing experiment are fresh in our minds, to 
apply its lesson in some measure to the condensation 



268 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

of the over-long training for peace ? By a reduction 
of studies to their essentials, and by the adoption of 
learning by immediate objectives, could we not 
reduce our present nineteen or twenty-year-long 
programs by as much as four years? We shall be 
poorer when this war is over, poorer to the end of 
our days and the whole world poorer with us, 
because of this adventure for world empire of the 
Hohenzollern family. The young men from whose 
ranks were to come the intellectual leaders, the engi- 
neers, the physicians, the teachers, the statesmen, 
the producers, the manufacturers, the master work- 
men, will not return in such numbers as they went 
forth. The schools will have to work harder to 
train others to fill their places and in addition they 
will have to train all more diligently for the larger 
life of service which our nation has taken upon itself. 
It is unlikely that they can perform their part in the 
world's reconstruction unless they are in session 
forty-eight weeks of each year instead of thirty- 
six, as hitherto. The time has come to use the 
educational plants of the country to capacity. 
Allowing them to stand idle for one-fourth of the 
year is not working them to their limit of usefulness. 
With proper health supervision, only such students 
as are physically able to profit by four terms of 
school work a year would be allowed to take it; 
but, on the other hand, the school which gives due 
attention to the physical welfare of its students will 
bring them through a year of continuous work in 
better condition than they now are in at the end of 
thirty-six weeks of school work and a long vacation 



EDUCATION BY IMMEDIATE OBJECTIVES 269 

of somewhat too profitless idleness in which they 
lack well-motivated occupation and the guidance 
and watchfulness of their elders. The continuous 
session school will be able to provide more time for 
playground activities and perhaps for weekly excur- 
sions. It need not be as much of a constraining in- 
fluence in young lives as schools have sometimes been. 
It seems unlikely that in the days after the war 
the school system will be content to offer the fullest 
opportunity of training to but a small part of the 
youth of the land. The war has shown us that what 
the country needs is not more theoretically trained 
men or more practically trained men, not more 
engineers and more workmen to carry out their ideas, 
but more master-mechanics who know the theory 
of their craft as well as the technique which that 
theory should control and direct. Labor, it is clear, 
is coming to its own throughout the world. It will 
have a larger share in the necessities and the comforts 
which life requires, but it will have new responsibili- 
ties. The worker and the worker's children must be 
fitted to bear them. Trained they must be in crafts- 
manship and trained as well to civic cooperative- 
ness. On the other hand, the problems of produc- 
tion are put by a thoughtful employer^ in this order : 

1. Education. 

2. The application of science to industry. 

3. The elimination of waste. 

4. The disposal of the product. 

5. Wages. 

6. Profits. 

^Mr. Ernest J. P. Benn, Managing Director of Benn Brothers, Ltd., 
in Carter's " Industrial Reconstruction." E. P. Dutton & Co. 



270 WHAT THE WAR TEACHES 

Those who speculate concerning the future look 
forward with much confidence to the upbuilding of 
world-wide unity of desire and endeavor. The food 
shortage, which will perhaps exist for some years, 
will require the land to be scientifically treated. 
An enormous work of repairing roads, railroads, 
factories, cities, and whole countries must be pushed 
forward. Increased production must, if it can be 
made to do so, pay the annual increments of the 
huge war debt. Greater efficiency, through larger 
scientific skill, will be required in all industries. 
Cooperation will be the universal objective. Capital 
and labor will develop greater mutuality of con- 
sideration than in the past. The freedom which 
men by millions have died for will yield the abiding 
fellowship which their devoted fellowship in service 
planted. The heroic age of our American people 
will not soon come to a close. For Thou, my 
country, art that puissant nation of Milton's vision 
and "the main purport of These States is to found 
a superb friendship, exalte, previously unknown." 



APPENDIX 



Education Act, 1918. 

[8 & 9 Geo. 5. Ch. 39.] 



ARRANGEMENT OF SECTIONS. 



A.D. 1918. 



National System of Public Education. 
Section. 

1. Progressive and comprehensive organisation of edu- 

cation. 

2. Development of education in public elementary 

schools. 

3. Establishment of continuation schools, 

4. Preparation and submission of schemes. 

5. Approval of schemes by Board of Education. 

6. Provisions as to co-operation and combination. 

7. Provision as to amount of expenditure for education. 

Attendance at School and Employment of Children and 
Young Persons. 

8. Provisions as to attendance at elementary schools. 

9. Provisions for avoidance of broken school terms. 

10. Compulsory attendance at continuation schools. 

11. Enforcement of attendance at continuation schools. 

12. Administrative provisions relating to continuation 

schools. 

13. Amendment of 3 Edw. 7. c. 45 and 4 Edw. 7. c. 15. 

14. Prohibition against employment of children in fac- 

tories, workshops, mines, and quarries. 

15. Further restrictions on employment of children. 

16. Penalties on illegal employment of children and young 

persons. 

Extension of Powers and Duties. 

17. Power to promote social and physical training. 

18. Medical inspection of schools and educational institu- 

tions. 

19. Nursery schools. 

20. Education of physically defective and epileptic children. 

21. Powers for the education of children in exceptional 

circumstances. 

T 273 



274 ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 

A.D. 1918. Section. 

22. Amendment of Education (Choice of Employment) 

Act, 1910. 

23. Power to aid research. 

24. Provision of maintenance allowances. 

25. Provisions as to medical treatment. 

Abolition of Fees in Public Elementary Schools. 

26. Abolition of fees in public elementary schools. 

Administrative Provisions. 

27. Voluntary inspection of schools. 

28. Collection of information respecting schools. 

29. Provisions with respect to appointment of certain 

classes of teachers. 

30. Provisions as to closing of schools. 

31. Grouping of non-provided schools of the same de- 

nominational character. 

32. Provisions relating to central schools and classes. 

33. Saving for certain statutory provisions. 

34. Acquisition of land by local education authority. 

35. Power to provide elementary schools outside area. 

36. Amendments with respect to the allocation of ex- 

penses to particular areas. 

37. Provisions as to expenses of Provisional Orders, &c. 

38. Expenses of education meetings, conferences, &c. 

39. Power to pay expenses of prosecution for cruelty. 

40. Public inquiries by Board of Education. 

41. Inspection of minutes. 

42. Payments to the Central Welsh Board. 

43. Evidence of certificates, &c. issued by local education 

authorities. 

Education Grants. 

44. Education grants. 

Educational Trusts. 

45. Power to constitute official trustees of educational 

trust property. 



ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 275 



Section. 

46. Exemption of assurance of property for educational 

purposes from certain restrictions under the Mort- 
main Acts. 

47. Appointment of new trustees under scheme. 

General. 

48. Definitions. 

49. Compensation to existing officers. 

50. Extension of certain provisions of the Education Acts. 

51. Repeals. 

52. Short title, construction, extent, and commencement. 
Schedules. 

CHAPTER 39. 

An Act to make further provision with respect to Edu- 
cation in England and Wales and for purposes connected 
therewith. [8th August 1918.1 

T)E it enacted by the King's most Excellent Majesty, 
by and with the advice and consent of the Lords 
Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present 
Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, 
as follows : — 

National System of Public Education. 

1. With a view to the establishment of a national system 
of public education available for all persons capable of 
profiting thereby, it shall be the duty of the council of every 
county and county borough, so far as their powers extend, 
to contribute thereto by providing for the progressive 
development and comprehensive organisation of education 
in respect of their area, and with that object any such 
council from time to time may, and shall when required 
by the Board of Education, submit to the Board schemes 
showing the mode in which their duties and powers under 
the Education Acts are to be performed and exercised, 
whether separately or in co-operation with other authorities. 

2. — (1) It shall be the duty of a local education au- 
thority so to exercise their powers under Part III. of the 
Education Act, 1902, as — 

(a) to make, or otherwise to secure, adequate and suit- 
able provision by means of central schools, central 
or special classes, or otherwise — 



A.D. 1918. 



Progressive 
and compre- 
hensive or- 
ganisation of 
education. 



Develop- 
ment of edu- 
cation in 
public ele- 
mentary 
schools. 
2 Edw. 7. 
c. 42. 



276 ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 



A.D. 1918. 



7Edw. 
c. 43. 



33 &, 34 Vict, 
c. 75. 



Establish- 
ment of 
continuation 
schools. 



(i) for including in the curriculum of public 
elementary schools, at appropriate stages, prac- 
tical instruction suitable to the ages, abilities, 
and requirements of the children ; and 

(ii) for organising in public elementary schools 
courses of advanced instruction for the older or 
more intelligent children in attendance at such 
schools, including children who stay at such 
schools beyond the age of fourteen ; 
(h) to make, or otherwise to secure, adequate and suit- 
able arrangements under the provisions of para- 
graph (6) of subsection (1) of section thirteen of 
the Education (Administrative Provisions) Act, 
1907, for attending to the health and physical 
condition of children educated in pubUc elemen- 
tary schools ; and 
(c) to make, or otherwise to secure, adequate and suit- 
able arrangements for co-operating with local 
education authorities for the purposes of Part II. 
of the Education Act, 1902, in matters of common 
interest, and particularly in respect of — 

(i) the preparation of children for further 
education in schools other than elementary, and 
their transference at suitable ages to such 
schools; and 

(ii) the supply and training of teachers ; 
and any such authority from time to time may, and shall 
when required by the Board of Education, submit to the 
Board schemes for the exercise of their powers as an au- 
thority for the purposes of Part III. of the Education Act, 
1902. 

(2) So much of the definition of the term "elementary 
school" in section three of the Elementary Education Act, 
1870, as requires that elementary education shall be the 
principal part of the education there given, shall not apply 
to such courses of advanced instruction as aforesaid. 

3. — (1) It shall be the duty of the local education 
authority for the purposes of Part II. of the Education Act, 
1902, either separately or in co-operation with other local 
education authorities, to establish and maintain, or secure 
the estabUshment and maintenance under their control 



ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 277 



and direction, of a suflBcient supply of continuation schools 
in which suitable courses of study, instruction, and physical 
training are p^o^dded without payment of fees for all young 
persons resident in their area who are, under this Act, 
under an obligation to attend such schools. 

(2) For the purposes aforesaid the local education 
authority from time to time may, and shall when required 
by the Board of Education, submit to the Board schemes 
for the progressive organisation of a system of continua- 
tion schools, and for securing general and regular attend- 
ance thereat, and in preparing schemes under this section 
the local education authority shall have regard to the de- 
sirabihty of including therein arrangements for co-operation 
with universities in the provision of lectures and classes 
for scholars for whom instruction by such means is suitable. 

(3) The council of any county shall, if practicable, 
provide for the inclusion of representatives of education 
authorities for the purposes of Part III. of the Education 
Act, 1902, in any body of managers of continuation schools 
within the area of those authorities. 

4. — (1) The council of any county, before submitting 
a scheme under this Act, shall consult the other authorities 
within their county (if any) who are authorities for the 
purposes of Part III. of the Education Act, 1902, with ref- 
erence to the mode in which and the extent to which any 
such authority will co-operate with the council in carrying 
out their scheme, and when submitting their scheme shall 
make a report to the Board of Education as to the co- 
operation which is to be anticipated from any such author- 
ity, and any such authority may, if they so desire, submit 
to the Board as well as to the council of the county any 
proposals or representations relating to the provision or 
organisation of education in the area of that authority 
for consideration in connection with the scheme of the 
county. 

(i2) Before submitting schemes under this Act a local 
education authority shall consider any representations 
made to them by parents or other persons or bodies of 
persons interested, and shall adopt such measures to ascer- 
tain their views as they consider desirable, and the author- 
ity shall take such steps to give publicity to their proposals 



A.D. 1918. 



Preparation 
and submis- 
sion of 
schemes. 



278 ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 



A.D. 1918. 



Approval of 
schemes by 
Board of 
Education. 



Provisions as 
to co-opera- 
tion and com- 
bination. 



as they consider suitable, or as the Board of Education 
may require. 

(3) A local education authority in preparing schemes 
under this Act shall have regard to any existing supply of 
eflScient and suitable schools or colleges not provided by 
local education authorities, and to any proposals to provide 
such schools or colleges. 

(4) In schemes under this Act adequate provision shall be 
made in order to secure that children and young persons 
shall not be debarred from receiving the benefits of any 
form of education by which they are capable of profiting 
through inability to pay fees. 

5. — (1) The Board of Education may approve any 
scheme (which term shall include an interim, provisional, 
or amending scheme) submitted to them under this Act 
by a local education authority, and thereupon it shall be 
the duty of the local education authority to give eflPect to 
the scheme. 

(2) If the Board of Education are of opinion that a 
scheme does not make adequate provision in respect of all 
or any of the purposes to which the scheme relates, and the 
Board are unable to agree with the authority as to what 
amendments should be made in the scheme, they shall 
offer to hold a conference with the representatives of the 
authority and, if requested by the authority, shall hold a 
public inquiry in the matter. 

(3) If thereafter the Board of Education disapprove a 
scheme, they shall notify the authority, and, if within one 
month after such notification an agreement is not reached, 
they shall lay before Parliament the report of the public 
inquiry (if any) together with a report stating their reasons 
for such disapproval and any action which they intend 
to take in consequence thereof by way of withholding or 
reducing any grants payable to the authority. 

6. — (1) For the purpose of performing any duty or exer- 
cising any power under the Education Acts, a coimcil 
having powers under those Acts may enter into such ar- 
rangements as they think proper for co-operation or com- 
bination with any other council or councils having such 
powers, and any such arrangement may provide for the 



ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 279 

appointment of a joint committee or a joint body of mana- A.D. 1918. 
gers, for the delegation to that committee or body of mana- 
gers of any powers or duties of the councils (other than the 
power of raising a rate or borrowing money), for the pro- 
portion of contributions to be paid by each council, and for 
any other matters which appear necessary for carrying out 
the arrangement. 

(2) The Board of Education may, on the application 
of two or more councils having powers under the Education 
Acts, by scheme provide for the establishment and (if 
thought fit) the incorporation of a federation for such pur- 
poses of any such arrangements as aforesaid as may be 
specified in the scheme as being purposes relating to 
matters of common interest concerning education which 
it is necessary or convenient to consider in relation to areas 
larger than those of individual education authorities, and 
the powers conferred on councils by this section shall in- 
clude power to arrange for the performance of any educa- 
tional or administrative functions by such a federation as 
if it were a joint committee or a joint body of managers : 

Provided that no council shall without its consent be 
included in a scheme establishing a federation, and no 
council shall be obliged to continue in a federation except 
in accordance with the provisions of a scheme to which it 
has consented. 

(3) A scheme made by the Board of Education consti- 
tuting a federation, and an arrangement establishing a 
joint committee or a joint body of managers, shall provide 
for the appointment of at least two-thirds of the members 
by councils having powers under the Education Acts, and 
may provide either directly or by co-optation for the in- 
clusion of teachers or other persons of experience in educa- 
tion and of representatives of universities or other bodies. 

(4) A scheme constituting a federation may on the appli- 
cation of one or more of the councils concerned be modified 
or repealed by a further scheme, and, where a scheme 
provides for the discontinuance of a federation, provision 
may be made for dealing with any property or liabilities 
of the federation. 

(5) Where any arrangement under this section provides 
for the payment of an annual contribution by one council 



280 ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 



A.D. 1918. 



Provision u 
to amount of 
expenditure 
for educa- 
tion. 



Provisions 
as to attend- 
ance at 
elementary 
schools. 



63 A 64 Vict. 
c. 53. 



to another, the contribution shall, for the purposes of 
section nineteen of the Education Act, 1902, form part of 
the security on which money may be borrowed under that 
section. 

7. The limit under section two of the Education Act, 
1902, on the amount to be raised by the council of a county 
out of rates for the purpose of education other than elemen- 
tary shall cease to have effect. 

Attendance at School and Employment of Children and 
Young Persons. 

8. — (1) Subject as provided in this Act, no exemption 
from attendance at school shall be granted to any child 
between the ages of five and fourteen years, and any enact- 
ment giving a power, or imposing a duty, to provide for 
any such exemption, and any provision of a byelaw provid- 
ing for any such exemption, shall cease to have effect, 
without prejudice to any exemptions already granted. 
Any byelaw which names a lower age than fourteen as the 
age up to which a parent shall cause his child to attend 
school shall have effect as if the age of fourteen were sub- 
stituted for that lower age. 

(2) In section seventy-four of the Elementary Educa- 
tion Act, 1870, as amended by section six of the Elementary 
Education Act, 1900, fifteen years shall be substituted for 
fourteen years as the maximum age up to which byelaws 
relating to school attendance may require parents to cause 
their children to attend school, and any such byelaw re- 
quiring attendance at school of children between the ages 
of fourteen and fifteen may apply either generally to all 
such children, or to children other than those employed 
in any specified occupations : 

Provided that it shall be lawful for a local education 
authority to grant exemption from the obHgation to attend 
school to individual children between the ages of fourteen 
and fifteen for such time and upon such conditions as the 
authority think fit in any case where after due inquiry the 
circumstances seem to justify such an exemption. 
y (3) It shall not be a defence to proceedings relating to 
school attendance under the Education Acts or any bye- 
laws made thereunder that a child is attending a school or 



ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 281 

institution providing efficient elementary instruction unless A.D. 1918. 
the school or institution is open to inspection either by the 
local education authority or by the Board of Education, 
and unless satisfactory registers are kept of the attendance 
of the scholars thereat. 

(4) A local education authority may with the approval 
of the Board of Education make a byelaw under section 
seventy-four of the Elementary Education Act, 1870, 
providing that parents shall not be required to cause their 
children to attend school or to receive efficient elementary 
instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic before the 
age of six years : 

Provided that in considering any such byelaw the Board 
shall have regard to the adequacy of the provision of nurs- 
ery schools for the area to which the byelaw relates, and 
shall, if requested by any ten parents of children attending 
public elementary schools for that area, hold a public 
inquiry for the purpose of determining whether the byelaw 
should be approved. 

(5) Notwithstanding anything in the Education Acts the 
Board of Education may, on the application of the local 
education authority, authorise the instruction of children 
in public elementary schools till the end of the school term 
in which they reach the age of sixteen or (in special cir- 
cumstances) such later age as appears to the Board desir- 
able: 

Provided that, in considering such application, the 
Board shall have regard to the adequacy and suitability 
of the arrangements made by the authority under para- 
graphs (a) and (c) of subsection (1) of section two of this 
Act and to the effective development and organisation of all 
forms of education in the area, and to any representations 
made by the managers of schools. 

(6) The power of a local education authority under 
section seven of the Education Act, 1902, to give directions 
as to secular instruction shall include the power to direct 
that any child in attendance at a public elementary school 
shall attend during such hours as may be directed by the 
authority at any class, whether conducted on the school 
premises or not, for the purpose of practical or special in- 



282 ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 191S 



A.D. 1918. 



39 & 40 Vict, 
c. 79. 



56 & 57 Vict, 
c. 42. 



stniction or demonstration, and attendance at such a class 
shall, where the local education authority so direct, be 
deemed for the purpose of any enactment or byelaw re- 
lating to school attendance to be attendance at a public 
elementary school : 

Provided that, if by reason of any such direction a child 
is prevented on any day from receiving religious instruc- 
tion in the school at the ordinary time mentioned in the 
time-table, reasonable facilities shall be afforded, subject 
to the provisions of section seven of the Elementary Edu- 
cation Act, 1870, for enabling such child to receive religious 
instruction in the school at some other time. 

(7) In section eleven of the Elementary Education Act, 
1876, (which relates to school attendance) for the words 
"there is not within two miles" there shall be substituted 
the words "there is not within such distance as may be 
prescribed by the byelaws." 

(8) Nothing in this section shall affect the provisions of 
the Elementary Education (Blind and Deaf Children) Act, 
1893, or the Elementary Education (Defective and Epilep- 
tic Children) Acts, 1899 to 1914, relating to the attendance 
at school of the children to whom those Acts apply. 



Prorisions 
for avoid- 
ance of 
broken 
school terms. 



9. — (1) If a child who is attending or is about to attend 
a public elementary school or a school certified by the 
Board of Education under the Elementary Education 
(Blind and Deaf Children) Act, 1893, or the Elementary 
Education (Defective and Epileptic Children) Acts, 1899 
to 1914, attains any year of age during the school term, the 
child shall not, for the purpose of any enactment or byelaw, 
whether made before or after the passing of this Act, re- 
lating to school attendance, be deemed to have attained 
that year of age until the end of the term. 

(2) The local education authority for the purposes of 
Part III. of the Education Act, 1902, may make regula- 
tions with the approval of the Board of Education provid- 
ing that a child may, in such cases as are prescribed by the 
regulations, be refused admission to a public elementary 
school or such certified school as aforesaid except at the 
commencement of a school term. 



ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 283 



10. — (1) Subject as hereinafter provided, all young A.D. 1918. 
persons shall attend such continuation schools at such 
times, on such days, as the local education authority of the Compulsory 
area in which they reside may require, for three hundred at continua- 
and twenty hours in each year, distributed as regards times *io^ schools, 
and seasons as may best suit the circumstances of each 
locality, or, in the case of a period of less than a year, for 
such number of hours distributed as aforesaid as the local 
education authority, having regard to all the circumstances, 
consider reasonable : 
Provided that — 

(a) the obligation to attend continuation schools shall 
not, within a period of seven years from the 
appointed day on which the provisions of this 
section come into force, apply to young persons 
between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, nor 
after that period to any young person who has 
attained the age of sixteen before the expiration 
of that period ; and 
(6) during the like period, if the local education 
authority so resolve, the number of hours for 
which a young person may be required to attend 
continuation schools in any year shall be two 
hundred and eighty instead of three hundred 
and twenty. 

(2) Any young person — 

(i) who is above the age of fourteen years on the ap- 
pointed day ; or 

(ii) who has satisfactorily completed a course of train- 
ing for, and is engaged in, the sea service, in 
accordance with the provisions of any national 
scheme which may hereafter be established, by 
Order in Council or otherwise, with the object 
of maintaining an adequate supply of well- 
trained British seamen, or, pending the estab- 
lishment of such scheme, in accordance with the 
provisions of any interim scheme approved by 
the Board of Education ; or 

(iii) who is above the age of sixteen years and either — 
(a) has passed the matriculation examina- 
tion of a university of the United Kingdom or 



284 ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 

A. D. 1918 an examination recognised by the Board of 

~~' Education for the purposes of this section as 

equivalent thereto ; or 

(6) is shown to the satisfaction of the local 
education authority to have been up to the 
age of sixteen under full-time instruction in a 
school recognised by the Board of Education 
as eflScient or under suitable and eflBcient full- 
time instruction in some other manner, 
shall be exempt from the obligation to attend continuation 
schools under this Act unless he has informed the authority 
in writing of his desire to attend such schools and the 
authority have prescribed what school he shall attend. 

(3) The obligation to attend continuation schools under 
this Act shall not apply to any young person — 

(i) who is shown to the satisfaction of the local education 
authority to be under full-time instruction in a 
school recognised by the Board of Education as 
• efficient or to be under suitable and efficient full- 

time instruction in some other manner ; or 
(ii) who is shown to the satisfaction of the local educa- 
tion authority to be under suitable and efficient 
part-time instruction in some other manner for a 
number of hours in the year (being hours during 
which if not exempted he might be required to 
attend continuation schools) equal to the number 
of hours during which a young person is required 
under this Act to attend a continuation school. 

(4) Where a school supplying secondary education is 
inspected by a British university, or in Wales or Mon- 
mouthshire by the Central Welsh Board, under regulations 
made by the inspecting body after consultation with the 
Board of Education, and the inspecting body reports to 
the Board of Education that the school makes satisfactory 
provision for the education of the scholars, a young person 
who is attending, or has attended, such a school shall for 
the purposes of this section be treated as if he were attend- 
ing, or had attended, a school recognised by the Board 
of Education as efficient. 

(5) If a young person who is or has been in any school or 
educational institution, or the parent of any such young 



ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 285 

person, represents to the Board that the young person is en- A.D. 1918. 

titled to exemption under the provisions of this section, 

or that the obligation imposed by this section does not 
apply to him, by reason that he is or has been under suit- 
able and eflScient instruction, but that the local education 
authority have unreasonably refused to accept the instruc- 
tion as satisfactory, the Board of Education shall consider 
the representation, and, if satisfied that the representation 
is well founded, shall make an order declaring that the 
young person is exempt from the obligation to attend a 
continuation school under this Act for such period and 
subject to such conditions as may be named in the order : 
Provided that the Board of Education may refuse to 
consider any such representation unless the local education 
authority or the Board of Education are enabled to inspect 
the school or educational institution in which the instruc- 
tion is or has been given. 

(6) The local education authority may require, in the 
case of any young person who is under an obligation to 
attend a continuation school, that his employment shall be 
suspended on any day when his attendance is required, 
not only during the period for which he is required to at- 
tend the school, but also for such other specified part of 
the day, not exceeding two hours, as the authority con- 
sider necessary in order to secure that he may be in a fit 
mental and bodily condition to receive full benefit from 
attendance at the school : Provided that, if any question 
arises between the local education authority and the em- 
ployer of a young person whether a requirement made 
under this subsection is reasonable for the purposes afore- 
said, that question shall be determined by the Board of 
Education, and, if the Board of Education determine that 
the requirement is unreasonable, they may substitute such 
other requirement as they think reasonable. 

(7) The local education authority shall not require any 
young person to attend a continuation school on a Sunday, 
or on any day or part of a day exclusively set apart for 
religious observance by the religious body to which he 
belongs, or during any holiday or half-holiday to which by 
any enactment regulating his employment or by agree- 
ment he is entitled, nor so far as practicable during any 



286 ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 

A.D. 1918. holiday or half-holiday which in his employment he is ac- 
customed to enjoy, nor between the hours of seven in the 
evening and eight in the morning : Provided that the local 
education authority may, with the approval of the Board, 
vary those hours in the case of young persons employed 
at night or otherwise employed at abnormal times. 

(8) A local education authority shall not, without the 
consent of a young person, require him to attend any con- 
tinuation school held at or in connection with the place of 
his employment. The consent given by a young person 
for the purpose of this provision may be withdrawn by one 
month's notice in writing sent to the employer and to the 
local education authority. 

Any school attended by a young person at or in connec- 
tion with the place of his employment shall be open to 
inspection either by the local education authority or by 
the Board of Education at the option of the person or per- 
sons responsible for the management of the school. 

(9) In considering what continuation school a young 
person shall be required to attend a local education author- 
ity shall have regard, as far as practicable, to any prefer- 
ence which a young person or the parent of a young person 
under the age of sixteen may express, and, if a young per- 
son or the parent of a young person imder the age of six- 
teen represents in writing to the local education authority 
that he objects to any part of the instruction given in the 
continuation school which the young person is required 
to attend, on the ground that it is contrary or offensive 
to his religious belief, the obligation under this Act to at- 
tend that school for the purpose of such instruction shall 
not ,apply to him, and the local education authority shall, 
if practicable, arrange for him to attend some other in- 
struction in lieu thereof or some other school. 



Enforcement 
of attend- 
ance at 
continuation 
schools. 



11. — (1) If a young person fails, except by reason of 
sickness or other unavoidable cause, to comply with any 
requirement imposed upon him under this Act for attend- 
ance at a continuation school, he shall be liable on summary 
conviction to a fine not exceeding five shillings, or, in the 
case of a second or subsequent offence, to a fine not ex- 
ceeding one pound. 



ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 287 



(i) If a parent of a young person has conduced to or 
connived at the failure on the part of the young person to 
attend a continuation school as required under this Act, he 
shall, unless an order has been made against him in respect 
of such failure under section ninety-nine of the Children 
Act, 1908, be liable on summary conviction to a fine not 
exceeding two pounds, or, in the case of a second or subse- 
quent offence, whether relating to the same or another 
young person, to a fine not exceeding five pounds. 

12. — (1) The Board of Education may from time to 
time make regulations prescribing the manner and form 
in which notice is to be given as to the continuation school 
(if any) which a young person is required to attend, and 
the times of attendance thereat, and as to the hours during 
which his employment must be suspended, and providing 
for the issue of certificates of age, attendance and exemp- 
tion, and for the keeping and preservation of registers of 
attendance, and generally for carrying into effect the pro- 
visions of this Act relating to continuation schools. 

(2) For the purposes of the provisions of this Act relat- 
ing to continuation schools, the expression "year" means 
in the case of any young person the period of twelve months 
reckoned from the date when he ceased to be a child, or 
any subsequent period of twelve months. 

13. — (1) The Employment of Children Act, 1903, so 
far as it relates to England and Wales, shall be amended 
as follows : — 

(i) For subsection (1) of section three the following 
subsection shall be substituted : — 

"A child under the age of twelve shall not be 
employed; and a child of the age of twelve or 
upwards shall not be employed on any Sunday 
for more than two hours, or on any day on which 
he is required to attend school before the close 
of school hours on that day, nor on any day 
before six o'clock in the morning or after eight 
o'clock in the evening : 

" Provided that a local authority may make a 
byelaw permitting, with respect to such occu- 
pations as may be specified, and subject to such 



A.D. 1918. 



8Edw. 
c. 67. 



7. 



Administra- 
tive pro- 
visions 
relating to 
continuation 
schools. 



Amendment 
of 3 Edw. 7. 
c. 45. & 
4 Edw. 7. 
c. 15. 



288 ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 

A.D. 1918. conditions as may be necessary to safeguard 

the interests of the children, the employment 

of children of the age of twelve or upwards be- 
fore school hours and the employment of chil- 
dren by their parents, but so that any employ- 
ment permitted by byelaw on a school day be- 
fore nine in the morning shall be limited to one 
hour, and that if a child is so employed before 
nine in the morning he shall not be employed for 
more than one hour in the afternoon." 
(ii) In subsection (2) of section three, which prohibits 
the employment of a child under the age of eleven 
years in street trading, the words "under the age 
of eleven years" shall be repealed : 
(iii) For section twelve the following section shall be 
substituted : — 

"Except as regards the City of London, the 
powers and duties of a local authority under 
this Act shall be deemed to be powers and duties 
under Part III. of the Education Act, 1902, 
and the provisions of the Education Acts for the 
time being in force with regard to those powers 
and duties and as to the manner in which the 
expenses of an authority under that Part of 
that Act shall be paid shall apply accord- 
ingly": 
(iv) For the definition of the expression "local author- 
ity" there shall be substituted the following 
definition : — 

"The expression 'local authority' means in 
the case of the City of London the mayor, 
aldermen, and commons of that city in common 
council assembled and elsewhere the local 
education authority for the purposes of Part 
III. of the Education Act, 1902." 

(2) The Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act, 1904, 
so far as it relates to England and Wales, shall be amended 
as follows : — 

(i) In paragraph (6) of section two, which restricts the 
employment of boys under the age of fourteen 
years and of girls under the age of siKteen years 



ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 289 

for the purpose of singing, playing or performing, A.D. 1918. 

or being exhibited for profit, or offering anything 

for sale, between nine p.m. and six a.m., "eight 

P.M." shall be substituted for "nine p.m." so 

far as relates to children under fourteen years 

of age : 

(ii) In paragraph (c) of section two, which restricts the 
employment of children under eleven years for 
the purpose of singing, playing or performing, 
or being exhibited for profit, or offering anything 
for sale, twelve years shall be substituted for 
eleven years : 

(iii) In section three, which relates to licences for the 
employment of children exceeding ten years of 
age, the age of twelve years shall be substituted 
for the age of ten years : 

(iv) A licence under section three to take part in any 
entertainment or series of entertainments, in- 
stead of being granted, varied, added to, or 
rescinded as provided by that section, shall be 
granted by the local education authority for the 
purposes of Part III. of the Education Act, 1902, 
of the area in which the child resides, subject to 
such restrictions and conditions as are prescribed 
by rules made by the Board of Education, and 
may be rescinded by the authority of any area in 
which it takes effect or is about to take effect 
if the restrictions and conditions of the licence 
are not observed, and, subject as aforesaid, may 
be varied or added to by that authority at the 
request of the holder of the licence : 
(v) The holder of a licence shall at least seven days 
before a child takes part in any entertainment or 
series of entertainments furnish the local educa- 
tion authority of the area in which the entertain- 
ment is to take place with particulars of the 
licence and such other information as the Board 
of Education may by rules prescribe, and if he 
fails to furnish such particulars and information 
as aforesaid he shall be liable on summary con- 
viction to a fine not exceeding five pounds : 
u 



290 ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 



A.D. 1918. 



Prohibition 
against em- 
ployment of 
children in 
factories, 
workshops, 
mines, and 
quarries. 
1 «fe 2 Geo. 5. 
c. 50. 

35 & 36 Vict. 
c. 77. 

38 & 39 Vict. 
c. 39. 



Further 
restrictions 
on employ- 
ment of 
children. 



(vi) Subsections (3) and (4) of section three shall cease 
to apply with respect to licences to take part in 
an entertainment or series of entertainments : 

(vii) If the applicant for a licence or a person to whom a 
licence has been granted feels aggrieved by any 
decision of a local education authority, he may 
appeal to the Board of Education, who may 
thereupon exercise any of the powers conferred 
on the local education authority by this section : 

(viii) The provisions of this subsection shall not apply 
to any licence in force on the appointed day : 
(ix) References to the Employment of Children Act, 
1903, shall be construed as references to that 
Act as amended by this Act. 

14. No child within the meaning of this Act shall be 
employed — 

(a) in any factory or workshop to which the Factory 

and Workshop Acts, 1901 to 1911, apply; or 

(b) in any mine to which the Coal Mines Act, 1911, 

applies; or 

(c) in any mine or quarry to which the Metalliferous 

Mines Acts, 1872 and 1875, apply; 

unless lawfully so employed on the appointed day; and 
those Acts respectively shall have effect as respects England 
and Wales as if this provision, so far as it relates to the 
subject-matter thereof, was incorporated therewith. 

15. — (1) The local education authority, if they are 
satisfied by a report of the school medical officer or other- 
wise that any child is being employed in such a manner as 
to be prejudicial to his health or physical development, or 
to render him unfit to obtain the proper benefit from his 
education, may either prohibit, or attach such conditions 
as they think fit to, his employment in that or any other 
manner, notwithstanding that the employment may be 
authorised under the other provisions of this Act or any 
other enactment. 

(2) It shall be the duty of the employer and the parent 
of any child who is in employment, if required by the local 
education authority, to furnish to the authority such infor- 
mation as to his employment as the authority may require. 



ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 291 



and, if the parent or employer fails to comply with any 
requirement of the local education authority or wilfully 
gives false information as to the employment, he shall be 
liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding forty 
shilUngs. 

16. If any person — 

(a) employs a child in such a manner as to prevent 
the child from attending school according to the 
Education Acts and the byelaws in force in the 
district in which the child resides ; or 

(6) having received notice of any prohibition or re- 
striction as to the employment of a child issued 
by a local education authority under this Act, 
employs a child in such a manner as to contra- 
vene the prohibition or restriction ; or 

(c) employs a young person in such a manner as to 

prevent the young person attending a continua- 
tion school which he is required to attend under 
this Act; or 

(d) employs a young person at any time when, in 

pursuance of any requirement under this Act 
issued by a local education authority, the em- 
ployment of that young person must be sus- 
pended ; 

he shall be deemed to have employed the child or young 
person in contravention of the Employment of Children 
Act, 1903, and subsections (1) and (2) of section five and 
section six and section eight of that Act shall apply accord- 
ingly as if they were herein re-enacted and in terms made 
applicable to children and young persons within the mean- 
ing of this Act as well as to children within the meaning 
of that Act. 



A.D. 1918. 



Penalties on 
illegal em- 
ployment of 
children and 
young per- 
sons. 



Extension of Powers and Duties. 

17. For the purpose of supplementing and reinforcing Power to 

the instruction and social and physical training provided 30°™°^^^ 

by the public system of education, and without prejudice physical 

to any other powers, a local education authority for the ^raimng. 
purposes of Part III. of the Education Act, 1902, as respects 
children attending public elementary schools, and a local 



292 ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 

A.D. 1918. education authority for the purposes of Part II. of that 
Act as respects other children and young persons and per- 
sons over the age of eighteen attending educational institu- 
tions, may, with the approval of the Board of Education, 
make arrangements to supply or maintain or aid the supply 
or maintenance of — 

(a) holiday or school camps, especially for young per- 
sons attending continuation schools ; 

(6) centres and equipment for physical training, play- 
ing fields (other than the ordinary playgrounds 
of public elementary schools not provided by the 
local education authority), school baths, school 
swimming baths ; 

(c) other facilities for social and physical training in 
the day or evening. 



Medical in- 
spection of 
schools and 
educational 
institutions. 



52 & 53 Vict. 
0.40. 



18. — (1) The local education authority for the pur- 
poses of Part II. of the Education Act, 1902, shall have the 
same duties and powers with reference to making provision 
for the medical inspection and treatment of children and 
young persons attending — 

(i) secondary schools provided by them ; 
(ii) any school to the governing body of which, in pur- 
suance of any scheme made under the Welsh Inter- 
mediate Education Act, 1889, any payments are 
made out of any general fund administered by a lo- 
cal education authority as a governing body under 
that Act, and any school of which a local educa- 
tion authority are the governing body under that 
Act; 
(iii) continuation schools under their direction and con- 
trol; and 
(iv) such other scbools or educational institutions (not 
being elementary schools) provided by them as 
the Board direct ; 

as a local education authority for the purposes of Part III. 
of the Education Act, 1902, have under paragraph (b) of 
subsection (1) of section thirteen of the Education (Ad- 
ministrative Provisions) Act, 1907, with reference to chil- 
dren attending public elementary schools, and may exer- 
cise the like powers as respects children and young persons 



ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 293 

attending any school or educational institution, whether A.D. 1918. 

aided by them or not, if so requested by or on behalf of 

the persons having the management thereof. 9 Edw. 7. 

(2) The Local Education Authorities (Medical Treat- 
ment) Act, 1909, shall apply where any medical treat- 
ment is given in pursuance of this section as it applies to 
treatment given in pursuance of section thirteen of the 
Education (Administrative Provisions) Act, 1907. 

19. — (1) The powers of local education authorities for Nursery 
the purposes of Part III. of the Education Act, 1902, shall "'^^ools. 
include power to make arrangements for — 

(a) supplying or aiding the supply of nursery schools 
(which expression shall include nursery classes) 
for children over two and under five years of age, 
or such later age as may be approved by the 
Board of Education, whose attendance at such a 
school is necessary or desirable for their healthy 
physical and mental development ; and 
(6) attending to the health, nourishment, and physical 

welfare of children attending nursery schools. 
(2) Notwithstanding the provisions of any Act of Parlia- 
ment the Board of Education may, out of moneys pro- 
vided by Parliament, pay grants in aid of nursery schools, 
provided that such grants shall not be paid in respect of 
any such school unless it is open to inspection by the local 
education authority, and unless that authority are enabled 
to appoint representatives on the body of managers to the 
extent of at least one-third of the total number of managers, 
and before recognising any nursery school the Board shall 
consult the local education authority. 

20. — A local education authority shall make arrange- Education of 
ments under the Elementary Education (Defective and Physically 
Epileptic Children) Acts, 1899 to 1914, for ascertaining and epileptic 
what children in their area are physically defective or children. 
epileptic within the meaning of those Acts, and the pro- ^ 45 
visions of the Elementary Education (Defective and 
Epileptic Children) Act, 1914, relating to mentally defec- 
tive children, shall be extended so as to apply to physically 
defective and epileptic children, and accordingly that Act 

shall have effect as if references therein to mentally de- 



294 ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 



A.D. 1918. 



Powers for 
the educa- 
tion of 
children in 
exceptional 
circum- 
stances. 



Amendment 
of Education 
(Choice of 
Employ- 
ment) Act, 
1910. 

10 Edw. 7. 
and 1 Geo. 5. 
C.37. 

Power to 
aid research. 



Provision of 
maintenance 
allowances. 



fective children included references to physically defec- 
tive and epileptic children. 

21. Where a local education authority for the purposes 
of Part III. of the Education Act, 1902, are satisfied in the 
case of any children that, owing to the remoteness of their 
homes or the conditions under which the children are living, 
or other exceptional circumstances affecting the children, 
those children are not in a position to receive the full bene- 
fit of education by means of the ordinary provision made 
for the purpose by the authority, the authority may, with 
the approval of the Board of Education, make such arrange- 
ments, either of a permanent or temporary character, and 
including the provision of board and lodging, as they think 
best suited for the purpose of enabling those children to re- 
ceive the benefit of efficient elementary education, and may 
for that purpose enter into such agreement with the 
parent of any such child as they think proper : 

Provided that where a child is boarded out in pursuance 
of this section the local education authority shall, if pos- 
sible, and, if the parent so requests, arrange for the board- 
ing out being with a person belonging to the religious per- 
suasion of the child's parents. 

22. Section one of the Education (Choice of Employ- 
ment) Act, 1910, which confers on certain local education 
authorities the power of assisting boys and girls with re- 
spect to the choice of employment, shall have effect as if 
"eighteen years of age" were therein substituted for 
"seventeen years of age." 

23. With a view to promoting the efficiency of teaching 
and advanced study, a local education authority for the 
purposes of Part II. of the Education Act, 1902, may aid 
teachers and students to carry on any investigation for the 
advancement of learning or research in or in connection with 
an educational institution, and with that object may aid 
educational institutions. 

24. It is hereby declared that the powers as to the provi- 
sion of scholarships conferred by subsection (2) of section 
twenty- three of the Education Act, 1902, and by section 
eleven of the Education (Administrative Provisions) Act, 
1907, include a power to provide allowances for mainte- 
nance. 



ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 295 



A.D. 1918. 

Provisions 
as to medical 
treatment. 



25. — A local education authority shall not, in exercise 
of the powers conferred upon them by paragraph (b) of sub- 
section (1) of section thirteen of the Education (Adminis- 
trative Provisions) Act, 1907, or by this Act, establish a 
general domiciliary service of treatment by medical prac- 
titioners for children or young persons, and in making ar- 
rangements for the treatment of children and young persona 
a local education authority shall consider how far they caa 
avail themselves of the services of private medical practi- 
tioners. 

Abolition of Fees in Public Elementary Schools. 

26. — (1) No fees shall be charged or other charges of Abolition 
any kind made in any public elementary school, except as °^ /^f ^ ^ 
provided by the Education (Provision of Meals) Act, 1906, mentary 
and the Local Education Authorities (Medical Treatment) schools. 
Act, 1909. 11^^- ^' 

(2) During a period of five years from the appointed day ^ ^^^' ^' 
the Board of Education shall in each year, out of moneys 
provided by Parliament, pay to the managers of a school 
maintained but not provided by a local education authority 

in which fees were charged immediately before the ap- 
pointed day, the average yearly sum paid to the managers 
under section fourteen of the Education Act, 1902, during 
the five years immediately preceding the appointed day. 

(3) Nothing in this Act shall affect the provisions of 
section nine of the Elementary Education (Blind and Deaf 
Children) Act, 1893, or of section eight of the Elementary 62 & 63 Vict. 
Education (Defective and Epileptic Children) Act, 1899. c. 32. 



Administrative Provisions. 

27. If the governing body of any school or educational yolu^tary 

,.,, . ., ^ mspection 

mstitution not liable to mspection by any Government of schools. 

department, or, if there is no governing body, the head- 
master, requests the Board of Education to inspect the 
school or institution and to report thereon, the Board of 
Education may do so, if they think fit, free of cost; but 
this section shall be without prejudice to the provnsions 
relating to the Central Welsh Board contained in subsec- 
tion (1) of section three of the Board of Education Act, 62 & 63 Vict. 
1899. ^- 33- 



296 ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 



A.D. 1918. 

Collection 
of informa- 
tion respect- 
ing schools. 



28. — (1) In order that full information may be avail- 
able as to the provision for education and the use made of 
such provision in England and Wales, — 

(a) It shall be the duty of the responsible person as 

hereinafter defined, in respect of every school or 
educational institution not in receipt of grants 
from the Board of Education, to furnish to the 
Board of Education in a form prescribed by the 
Board — 

(i) in the case of a school or educational insti- 
tution existing at the appointed day, within 
three months of that day ; 

(ii) in the case of a school or educational 
institution opened after the appointed day, 
within three months of the opening thereof ; 
the name and address of the school or institution 
and a short description of the school or institu- 
tion: 

(b) It shall be the duty of every such responsible person 

when required by the Board of Education to fur- 
nish to the Board such further particulars with 
respect to the school or institution as may be 
prescribed by regulations made by the Board : 
Provided that the Board may exempt from both or either 
of the above obligations any schools or educational insti- 
tutions with respect to which the necessary information 
is already in the possession of the Board or is otherwise 
available. 

(2) If the responsible person fails to furnish any infor- 
mation required by this section, he shall be liable on sum- 
mary conviction to a penalty not exceeding ten pounds, 
and to a penalty not exceeding five pounds for every day 
on which the failure continues after conviction therefor. 

(3) For the purposes of this section "the responsible 
person" means the secretary or person performing the duty 
of secretary to the governing body of the school or institu- 
tion, or, if there is no governing body, the headmaster or 
person responsible for the management of the school or 
institution. 

(4) Any regulations made by the Board of Education 
under this section with respect to the particulars to be 



ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 297 



furnished shall be laid before Parliament as soon as may be 
after they are made. 

29. — (1) Notwithstanding anything in the Education 
Act, 1902, the appointment of all teachers of secular sub- 
jects not attached to the stafif of any particular public 
elementary school and teachers appointed for the purpose 
of giving practical instruction, pupil teachers, and student 
teachers, shall be made by the local education authority, 
and it is hereby declared that the local education authority 
have power to direct the managers of any public elementary 
schools not provided by them to make arrangements for 
the admission of any such teachers to the schools. 

(2) The provisions of subsection (3) of section seven of 
the Education Act, 1902, shall apply to any question which 
arises under this section between the local education au- 
thority and the managers of a school. 



A.D. 1918. 



Provisions 
with respect 
to appoint- 
ment of cer- 
tain classes 
of teachers. 



30. — (1) The managers of a public elementary school Provisions as 
not provided by the local education authority, if they wish ^^^^^^^^ °» 
to close the school, shall give eighteen months' notice to 
the local education authority of their intention to close the 
school, and a notice under this provision shall not be with- 
drawn except with the consent of the local education au- 
thority. 

(2) If the managers of a school who have given such a 
notice are unable or unwilling to carry on the school up to 
the expiration of the period specified in the notice, the 
school house shall be put at the disposal of the local educa- 
tion authority, if the authority so desire, for the whole or 
any part of the period, free of charge, for the purposes of a 
school provided by them, but subject to an obligation on the 
part of the authority to keep the school house in repair 
and to pay any outgoings in respect thereof, and to allow 
the use of the school house and the school furniture by the 
persons who were the managers of the school to the like 
extent and subject to the like conditions as if the school 
had continued to be carried on by those managers. 

The use by the authority of the school house during 
such period for the purposes of a school provided by them 
shall not be deemed, for the purposes of section eight of the 



^98 ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 



A.D. 1918 



Grouping of 
non-provided 
schools of 
the same de- 
nominational 
character. 



Provisions 
relating to 
central 
schools and 
classes. 
3 Edw. 7. 
c. 24, 



Education Act, 1902, to constitute the provision of a new 
school. 

31. Where there are two or more public elementary 
schools not provided by the local education authority of 
the same denominational character in the same locality, 
the local education authority, if they consider that it is 
expedient for the purpose of educational efficiency and 
economy, may, with the approval of the Board of Educa- 
tion, give directions for the distribution of the children 
in those schools according to age, sex, or attainments, and 
otherwise with respect to the organisation of the schools; 
and for the grouping of the schools under one body of man- 
agers constituted in the manner provided by subsection 
(2) of section twelve of the Education Act, 1902 : 

Provided that, if the constitution of the body of mana- 
gers falls to be determined by the Board of Education 
under that section, the Board shall observe the principles 
and proportions prescribed by sections six and eleven of 
that Act; and that, if the managers of a school affected 
by any directions given under this section request a public 
inquiry, the Board shall hold a public inquiry before ap- 
proving those directions. 

32. — (1) Notwithstanding the provisions of section six 
of the Education Act, 1902, or, in the case of London, sub- 
section (1) of section two of the Education (London) Act 
1903, as to the appointment of managers, any public ele- 
mentary school which in the opinion of the Board is or- 
ganised for the sole purpose of giving advanced instruction 
to older children may be managed in such manner as may 
be approved by the local education authority, and, in the 
case of a school not provided by that authority, also by the 
managers of the school. 

(2) Notwithstanding anything contained in sections six 
and eight of the Education Act, 1902, or in section two 
of the Education (London) Act, 1903, the provision of 
premises for classes in practical or advanced instruction for 
children attending from more than one public elementary 
school shall not be deemed to be the provision of a new 
public elementary school, and any class conducted in such 
premises may be managed in such manner as may be ap- 
proved by the local education authority. 



ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 299 

33. Except as expressly provided by this Act, nothing in A.D. 1918. 
this Act shall affect the provisions of the Education Acts 

relating to public elementary schools not provided by the ^^^^^^ ^g°^^^^. 
local education authority or the provisions of Part II. of tory provi- 
the Education Act, 1902. «io^- 

34. — (1) A local education authority may be authorised Acquisition 
to purchase land compulsorily for the purpose of any of their °^ land by ^ 
powers or duties under the Education Acts, by means of an tion author- 
order submitted to the Board of Education and confirmed ity. 

by the Board in accordance with the provisions contained 
in paragraphs (1) to (13) of the First Schedule to the Hous- 9 Edw. 7. 
ing, Town Planning, &c. Act, 1909, and those provisions *'• '*'*• 
shall have effect for the purpose, with the substitution of 
the Board of Education for the Local Government Board, 
of the local education authority for the local authority, and 
of references to the Education Acts for references to "this 
Act": 
Provided that — 

(a) the Board of Education shall not confirm any such 
order even when unopposed if they are of opinion 
that the land is unsuited for the purpose for 
which it is proposed to be acquired ; 
(6) an order for the compulsory purchase of land in the 
administrative county of London shall be subject 
to the Drovisions of subsection (2) of section 
two of the Education (London) Act, 1903; 
(c) an order for the compulsory purchase of land 
which by section forty-five of the Housing, 
Town Planning, &c.. Act, 1909, is exempt from 53 & 54 Vict, 
compulsory acquisition for the purposes of Part *'• '^''• 
III. of the Housing of the Working Classes Act, 
1890, shall be provisional only and shall not 
have effect unless and until it is confirmed by 
Parhament. 

(2) The powers given by this section in relation to the 
compulsory purchase of land by the local education author- 
ity shall be in substitution for any other powers existing 
for that purpose, but without prejudice to any powers con- 
ferred by any Provisional Order confirmed by Parliament 
before the appointed day. 



300 ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 



A.D. 1918. 

Power to 
provide ele- 
mentary 
schools out- 
side area. 



Amendments 
with respect 
to the allo- 
cation of 
expenses to 
particular 
areas. 



Provisions as 
to expenses 
of Pro- 
visional 
Orders, &c. 



36. A local education authority may, with the consent of 
the Board of Education, who shall consult the authority 
of the area in which the proposed site is situated, provide 
a public elementary school, in cases where it appears con- 
venient to do so, on a site outside their area for the use of 
children within their area, and for the purposes of the Edu- 
cation Acts a school so provided shall be deemed to be situ- 
ated within the area of the authority. 

36. — (1) It shall not be obligatory on a county council 
to charge on or raise within particular areas any portion of 
such expenses as are mentioned in paragraph (c) or para- 
graph (d) of subsection (1) of section eighteen of the Edu- 
cation Act, 1902, and accordingly each of those paragraphs 
shall have effect as if for the word "shall" there was sub- 
stituted the word "may" and as if the words "less than one 
half or" were omitted therefrom; and, where before the 
passing of this Act any portion of such expenses has been 
charged on or allocated to any area, the county council 
may cancel or vary the charge or allocation. 

(2) Before charging any expenses under section eighteen 
(1) (o) of the Education Act, 1902, on any area situate 
within a borough or urban district the council of which is 
an authority for the purposes of Part III. of the Education 
Act, 1902, a county council shall consult the council of the 
borough or urban district concerned. 

37. Any expenses incurred by a council in connection 
with any Provisional Order for the purposes of the Educa- 
tion Acts, or any Order under this Act for the purpose of 
the acquisition of land, shall be defrayed as expenses of the 
council under the Education Act, 1902, and the council 
shall have the same power of borrowing for the purpose of 
those expenses as they have under section nineteen of the 
Education Act, 1902, for the purpose of the expenses therein 
mentioned. 



Expenses of 

education 

meetings, 

conferences, 

&c. 



38. Any council having powers under the Education 
Acts may, subject to regulations made by the Board of 
Education, defray as part of their expenses under those 
Acts any reasonable expenses incurred by them in paying 
subscriptions towards the cost of, or otherwise in connection 



ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 301 

with, meetings or conferences held for the purpose of dis- A.D. 1918. 

cussing the promotion and organisation of education or 

educational administration, and the attendance of persons 
nominated by the council at any such meeting or confer- 
ence : Provided that — 

(a) the expenses of more than three persons in connec- 

tion with any meeting or conference shall not be 
paid except with the previous sanction of the 
Board of Education ; 

(b) payments for travelling expenses and subsistence 

shall be in accordance with the scale adopted by 
the council; 

(c) expenses shall not be paid in respect of any meeting 

or conference outside the United Kingdom unless 
the Board of Education have sanctioned the at- 
tendance of persons nominated by the council 
at the meeting or the conference; 

(d) no expenses for any purpose shall be paid under this 

section without the approval of the Board of Edu- 
cation, unless expenditure for the purpose has been 
specially authorised or ratified by resolution of the 
council, after special notice has been given to 
members of the council of the proposal to author- 
ise or ratify the expenditure, or, where a council 
has delegated its powers under this section to the 
education committee, by resolution of that com- 
mittee after like notice has been given to the 
members thereof. 



39. The powers of a local education authority for the Power to pay 

purposes of Part III. of the Education Act, 1902, shall expenses of 
, . prosecution 

include a power to prosecute any person under section for cruelty. 

twelve of the Children Act, 1908, where the person against 

whom the offence was committed was a child within the 

meaning of this Act, and to pay any expenses incidental 

to the prosecution. 

40. — (1) The Board of Education may hold a public Public in- 
inquiry for the purpose of the exercise of any of their ^"^^I / 
powers or the performance of any of their duties under the Education. 
Education Acts. 



302 ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 

A.D. 1918. (2) The following provisions shall (except as otherwise 
provided by the Education Acts) apply to any public in- 
quiry held by the Board of Education : — 

(a) The Board shall appoint a person or persons to hold 
the inquiry : 

(6) The person or persons so appointed shall hold a 
sitting or sittings in some convenient place in the 
neighbourhood to which the subject of the inquiry 
relates, and thereat shall hear, receive, and ex- 
amine any evidence and information offered, and 
hear and inquire into the objections or representa- 
tions made respecting the subject matter of the 
inquiry, with power from time to time to adjourn 
any sitting : 

(c) Notice shall be published in such manner as the 

Board direct of every such sitting, except an ad- 
journed sitting, seven days at least before the hold- 
ing thereof : 

(d) The person or persons so appointed shall make a 

report in writing to the Board setting forth the 
result of the inquiry and the objections and repre- 
sentations, if any, made thereat, and any opinion 
or recommendations submitted by him or them to 
the Board : 

(e) The Board shall furnish a copy of the report to any 

local education authority concerned with the sub- 
ject matter of the inquiry, and, on payment of 
such fee as may be fixed by the Board, to any per- 
son interested : 

(/) The Board may, where it appears to them reason- 
able that such an order should be made, order the 
payment of the whole or any part of the costs of 
the inquiry either by any local education authority 
to whose administration the inquiry appears to 
the Board to be incidental, or by the applicant for 
the inquiry, and may require the applicant for 
an inquiry to give security for the costs thereof : 

(jg) Any order so made shall certify the amount to be 
paid by the local education authority or the appli- 
cant, and any amount so certified shall, without 
prejudice to the recovery thereof as a debt due to 



ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 303 



the Crown, be recoverable by the Board sum- A.D. 1918. 
marily as a civil debt from the authority or the 
applicant as the case may be. 

41. The minutes of the proceedings of a local education Inspection 
authority and, where a local education authority delegate ° n^i^u e8. 
to their education committee any powers and the acts and 
proceedings of the education committee as respects the 
exercise of those powers are not required to be submitted 
to the council for their approval, the minutes of the pro- 
ceedings of the education committee relating to the exercise 
of those powers, shall be open to the inspection of any 
ratepayer at any reasonable time during the ordinary 
hours of business on payment of a fee of one shilling, and 
any ratepayer may make a copy thereof or take an extract 
therefrom. 



42. — (1) For the yearly sum payable to the Central 
Welsh Board under the scheme regulating the intermediate 
and technical education fund of any county, as defined by 
the Welsh Intermediate Education Act, 1889, there shall 
be substituted — 

(a) a yearly sum equal to a percentage not exceeding 
twenty-two and a half per cent, fixed from time to 
time at a uniform rate for every county by the 
Central Welsh Board of the sum produced by a 
rate of one halfpenny in the pound for the pre- 
ceding year, calculated in the manner provided by 
subsection (3) of section eight of the Welsh Inter- 
mediate Education Act, 1889 ; and 
(6) a yearly sum equal to five per cent of the net income 
for the preceding year of any endowment com- 
prised in the intermediate and technical education 
fund of the county, or, in the alternative, for each 
year during such period as may be agreed with the 
Central Welsh Board, such yearly sum as that 
Board may agree to accept in lieu thereof. 

(2) For the purpose of ascertaining the said net income 
there shall be deducted from the gross income all proper 
expenses and outgoings in respect of administration and 
management of the endowment (including charges for 
interest on and repayment of loans and replacement of 



Payments to 
the Central 
Welsh 
Board. 



304 ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 



A.D. 1918. 



Evidence of 
certificatea 
&c. issued 
by local 
education 
authorities. 



capital), and any sums required by the scheme to be treated 
as capital, and the term "endowment" shall include aug- 
mentations acquired by the investment of surplus income 
whether derived from endowment or county rate, or from 
any other source, but not property occupied for the pur- 
poses of the scheme. 

(3) The power of charging capitation fees for scholars 
offered for examination conferred on the Central Welsh 
Board by the scheme of the thirteenth day of May, eighteen 
hundred and ninety-six, regulating the Central Welsh In- 
termediate Education Fund shall cease. 

(4) The provisions of this section shall have effect and be 
construed as part of the schemes regulating the Central 
Welsh Intermediate Education Fund and the intermediate 
and technical education funds of counties in Wales and 
Monmouthshire, and may be repealed or altered by future 
schemes accordingly. 

43. All orders, certificates, notices, requirements, and 
documents of a local education authority under the Educa- 
tion Acts, if purporting to be signed by the clerk of the 
authority or of the education committee, or by the director 
of, or secretary for, education, shall until the contrary is 
proved be deemed to be made by the authority and to have 
been so signed, and may be proved by the production of a 
copy thereof purporting to have been so signed. 



Education 
grants. 



Education Grants. 

44. — (1) The Board of Education shall, subject to the 
provisions of this Act, by regulations provide for the pay- 
ment to local education authorities out of moneys provided 
by Parliament of annual substantive grants in aid of educa- 
tion of such amount and subject to such conditions and 
limitations as may be prescribed in the regulations, and 
nothing in any Act of Parliament shall prevent the Board 
of Education from paying grants to an authority in respect 
of any expenditure which the authority may lawfully incur. 

(2) Subject to the regulations made imder the next 
succeeding subsection, the total sums paid to a local edu- 
cation authority out of moneys provided by Parliament and 
the local taxation account in aid of elementary education 



ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 305 

or education other than elementary, as the case may be, A.D. 1918. 
shall not be less than one half of the net expenditure of the 
authority recognised by the Board of Education as expendi- 
ture in aid of which parliamentary grants should be made 
to the authority, and, if the total sums payable out of those 
moneys to an authority in any year fall short of one half of 
that expenditure, there shall be paid by the Board of Edu- 
cation to that authority, out of moneys provided by Parlia- 
ment, a deficiency grant equal to the amount of the de- 
ficiency, provided that a deficiency grant shall not be so 
paid as to make good to the authority any deductions made 
from a substantive grant. 

(3) The Board of Education may make regulations for 
the purpose of determining how the amount of any de- 
ficiency grant payable under this section shall be ascer- 
tained and paid, and those regulations shall, if the Treasury 
so direct, provide for the exclusion in the ascertainment of 
that amount of all or any sums paid by any Government 
department other than the Board of Education and of all 
or any expenditure which in the opinion of the Board of 
Education is attributable to a service in respect of which 
payments are made by a Government department other 
than the Board of Education. 

(4) The fee grant under the Elementary Education Act, 54 & 55 Vict. 

1891, as amended by the Elementary Education (Fee 2' ?^; /-. 

, 6&7 Geo. 5. 

Grant) Act, 1916, the aid grant under section ten of the c. 35. 

Education Act, 1902, and the small population grant under 39 & 40 Vict. 

section nineteen of the Elementary Education Act, 1876, 53 ^ 54 yict. 

as amended by the Education Code (1890) Act, 1890, and c. 22. 

the Education (Small Population Grants) Act, 1915, shall 

cease on the appointed day. 

(5) If, by reason of the failure of an authority to perform 
its duties under the Education Acts or to comply with the 
conditions on which grants are made, the deficiency grant 
is reduced or a deduction is made from any substantive 
grant exceeding five hundred pounds or the amount which 
would be produced by a rate of a halfpenny in the pound 
whichever is the less, the Board of Education shall cause 
to be laid before Parliament a report stating the amount 
of and the reasons for the reduction or deduction. 

X 



5 & 6 Geo. 5. 
c. 95. 



306 ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 

A.D. 1918. (6) Any regulations made by the Board of Education for 

the payment of grants shall be laid before Parliament as 

soon as may be after they are made. 



Power to 

constitute 
oflBcial trus- 
tees of edu- 
cational trust 
property. 



Educational Trusts. 

45. — (1) His Majesty may by Order in Council consti- 
tute and incorporate with power to hold land without 
licence in mortmain one or more official trustees of educa- 
tional trust property, and may apply to the trustee or 
trustees so constituted the provisions of the Charitable 
Trusts Acts, 1853 to 1914, relating to the official trustee of 
charity lands and the official trustees of charitable funds so 
far as they relate to endowments which are held for or ought 
to be applied to educational purposes. 

(2) On the constitution of an official trustee or official 
trustees of educational trust property, — 

(a) all land or estates or interests in land then vested in 

the official trustee of charity lands which are held 
by him as endowments for solely educational piu*- 
poses, and 

(b) all securities then vested in the official trustees of 

charitable funds which those trustees certify to be 
held by them as endowments for solely educational 
purposes, 
shall by virtue of this Act vest in the official trustee or 
trustees of educational trust property upon the trusts and 
for the pm-poses for which they were held by the official 
trustee of charity lands and the official trustees of charitable 
funds, and, on such a certificate by the official trustees of 
charitable funds as aforesaid being sent to the person hav- 
ing charge of the books or registers in which any such 
securities are inscribed or registered, that person shall 
make such entries in the books or registers as may be 
necessary to give effect to this section. 

(3) If any question arises as to whether an endowment 
or any part of an endowment is held for or ought to be ap- 
plied to solely educational purposes, the question shall be 
determined by the Charity Commissioners. 



ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 307 



46. — (1) Any assurance, as defined by section ten of the 
Mortmain and Charitable Uses Act, 1888, of land or per- 
sonal estate to be laid out in the purchase of land for edu- 
cational purposes, whether made before or after the passing 
of this Act, shall be exempt from any restrictions of the 
law relating to Mortmain and Charitable Uses, and the 
Mortmain and Charitable Uses Acts, 1888 and 1891, and 
the Mortmain and Charitable Uses Act Amendment Act, 
1892, shall not apply with respect to any such assurance. 

(2) Subsection (1) of section ten of the Technical and. 
Industrial Institutions Act, 1892, so far as it relates to the 
enrolment in the books of the Charity Commissioners of 
every conveyance or assurance of land for the purposes of 
institutions established under that Act, is hereby repealed. 

(3) Every assurance of land or personal estate to be laid 
out in the purchase of land for educational purposes, in- 
cluding every assurance of land to any local authority for 
any educational purpose or purposes for which such author- 
ity is empowered by any Act of Parliament to acquire land, 
shall be sent to the offices of the Board of Education in 
London for the purpose of being recorded in the books of 
the Board as soon as may be after the execution of the deed 
or other instrument of assurance, or in the case of a will 
after the death of the testator. 



A.D. 1918. 

Exemption 
of assurance 
of property 
for educa- 
tional pur- 
poses from 
certain re- 
strictions 
under the 
Mortmain 
Acts. 

51 & 52 Vict, 
c. 42. 

54 & 55 Vict, 
c. 73. 

55 & 56 Vict, 
c. 11. 

55 & 56 Vict, 
c. 29. 



47. Where, under any scheme made before the passing 
of this Act relating to an educational charity, the approval 
of the Board of Education is required to the exercise by the 
trustees under the scheme of a power of appointing new 
trustees, the scheme shall, except in such cases as the Board 
may otherwise direct, have effect as if no such approval 
was required thereunder, and the Board may by order 
make such modifications of any such scheme as may be 
necessary to give effect to this provision. 



Appoint- 
ment of new 
trustees 
under 
scheme. 



General. 

48. — (1) In this Act, unless the context otherwise re- Definitions, 
quires, — 

The expression " child " means any child up to the age 
when his parents cease to be under an obligation to 



308 ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 

A.D. 1918. cause him to receive efficient elementary instnic- 
tion or to attend school under the enactments re- 
lating to elementary education and the byelaws 
made thereunder; 

The expression " young person" means a person under 
eighteen years of age who is no longer a child ; 

The expression "parent" in relation to a young per- 
son includes guardian and every person who is 
liable to maintain or has the actual custody of the 
young person ; 

The expression "practical instruction" means in- 
struction in cookery, laundrywork, housewifery, 
dairywork, handicrafts, and gardening, and such 
other subjects as the Board declare to be subjects 
of practical instruction ; 

The expression " school term" means the term as fixed 
by the local education authority ; 

The expression "sea service" has the same meaning 
as in the Merchant Shipping Acts, 1894 to 1916, 
and includes sea-fishing service ; 

Other expressions have the same meaning as in the 
Education Acts. 

(2) In the Education Acts the expressions "employ" 
and "employment" used in reference to a child or young 
person include employment in any labour exercised by way 
of trade or for the purposes of gain, whether the gain be to 
the child or young person or to any other person. 



Compensa- 
tion to exist- 
ing ofl&cers. 
51 & 52 Vict. 
c. 41. 



49. Section one hundred and twenty of the Local Gov- 
ernment Act, 1888, which relates to compensation to exist- 
ing officers shall apply to officers serving under local edu- 
cation authorities at the passing of this Act who, by virtue 
of this Act or anything done in pursuance or in con- 
sequence of this Act, suffer direct pecuniary loss by 
abolition of office or by diminution or loss of fees or salary, 
subject as follows : — 

(a) Teachers in public elementary schools maintained by 
a local education authority shall be deemed to be 
officers serving under that authority ; 
(6) References to a county council shall include refer- 
ences to a borough or urban district council ; 



ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 309 



(c) The reference to "the passing of this Act" shall be 

construed as a reference to the date when the loss 
arose ; 

(d) The reference to the Acts and rules relating to His 

Majesty's civil service shall be construed as a 
reference to the Acts and rules which were in 
operation at the date of the passing of the Local 
Government Act, 1888; and 

(e) Any expenses shall be paid by the council under 

whom the officer was serving at the date when the 
loss arose out of the fund or rate out of which the 
expenses of the council under the Education Acts 
are paid, and, if any compensation is payable 
otherwise than by way of an annual sum, the 
payment of that compensation shall be a purpose 
for which a council may borrow for the purposes 
of those Acts. 

50. The provisions of the Education Acts mentioned 
in the first column of the First Schedule to this Act shall 
apply with respect to young persons, continuation schools, 
and the Education Acts and instruments made thereunder 
in like manner as they apply with respect to children, ele- 
mentary schools, and the enactments mentioned in those 
provisions and instruments made under those enactments, 
and accordingly those provisions shall have effect as set 
out and modified in the second column of that schedule. 



A.D. 1918. 



Extension of 
certain pro- 
visions of 
the Educa- 
tion Acts. 



51. The enactments mentioned in the Second Schedule Repeals 
to this Act are hereby repealed to the extent specified in 
the third column of that schedule. 



52. — (1) This Act may be cited as the Education Act, 
1918, and shall be read as one with the Education Acts, 
1870 to 1916, and those Acts and this Act may be cited 
together as the Education Acts, 1870 to 1918, and are in 
this Act referred to as "the Education Acts." 

(2) This Act shall not extend to Scotland or Ireland. 

(3) This Act shall come into operation on the appointed 
day, and the appointed day shall be such day as the Board 
of Education may appoint, and different days may be ap- 
pointed for different purposes and for different provisions 



Short title, 
construction, 
extent, and 
commence- 
ment. 



310 ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 

A.D. 1918. of this Act, for different areas or parts of areas, and for 

different persons or classes of persons : 

Provided that the appointed day for the purposes of sub- 
sections (1) and (2) of section eight shall not be earlier than 
the termination of the present war, and for the purposes 
of paragraph (iii) of subsection (2) of section thirteen 
shall not be earlier than three years after the passing of 
this Act, and that for a period of seven years from the ap- 
pointed day the duty of the council of a county (other than 
the London County Council) shall not include a duty to 
establish certified schools for boarding and lodging physi- 
cally defective and epileptic children. 



ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 311 



SCHEDULES. 



FIRST SCHEDULE. 

Extension of Enactments. 



Enactment extended. 



Elementary Educa- 
tion Act, 1870. 

8.36 



8.81 



8.84 



Enactment as extended. 



Every local education authority may, 
if they think fit, appoint an officer 
or officers to enforce the Educa- 
tion Acts and any byelaws, orders, 
or other instruments made there- 
under with reference to the at- 
tendance of children or young per- 
sons at school. . . . 

Certificates, notices, requisitions, 
orders, preceJDts, and all documents 
required by the Education Acts or 
any regulations or byelaws made 
thereunder to be served or sent 
may, unless otherwise expressly 
provided, be served and sent by 
post, and, till the contrary is 
proved, shall be deemed to have 
been served and received respec- 
tively at the time when the letter 
containing the same would be de- 
livered in the ordinary course of 
post; and in proving such service 
or sending it shall be sufficient to 
prove that the letter containing the 
certificate, notice, requisition, or- 
der, precept, or document was pre- 
paid, and properly addressed, and 
put into the post. 

After the expiration of three months 
from the date of any order or req- 
uisition of the Board of Educa- 
tion under the Education Acts 
such order or requisition shall be 
presumed to have been duly made, 
and to be within the powers of the 
Education Acts, and no objection 
to the legality thereof shall be en- 
tertained in any legal proceeding 
whatever. 



A.D. 1918. 
Section 50. 



312 ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 



A.D. 1918. 



Enactment extended. 



Elementary Educa- 
tion Act, 1873. 

s. 24 



Elementary Educa- 
tion Act, 1873. 



Enactment aa extended 



With respect to proceedings before a 
court of summary jurisdiction for 
offences and penalties under the 
Education Acts or any byelaws 
made thereunder the following 
provisions shall have effect : — 
* * * * 

(4) Any justice may require 
by summons any parent or em- 
ployer of a child or young per- 
son, required by the Education 
Acts or by any byelaws, orders, 
or other instruments made there- 
under to attend school, to pro- 
duce the child or young person 
before a court of summary juris- 
diction, and any person failing, 
without reasonable excuse to the 
satisfaction of the court, to 
comply with such summons shall 
be liable to a penalty not ex- 
ceeding twenty shillings. 



(5) A certificate purporting 
to be under the hand of the 
principal teacher of a public ele- 
mentary or continuation school, 
stating that a child or young 
person is or is not attending such 
school, or stating the particulars 
of the attendance of a child or 
young person at such school, 
shall be evidence of the facts 
stated in such certificate. 

(6) Where a child or young 
person is apparently of the age 
alleged for the purposes of the 
proceedings, it shall lie on the 
defendant to prove that the 
child or young person is not of 
such age. 

* * * * 

(8) Where a local education 
authority are, by reason of the 
default of the managers or pro- 



ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 313 



Enactment extended. 



Elementary Educa- 
tion Act, 1876. 

s. 38 



A.D. 1918. 



Enactment as extended. 



prietor of an elementary or con- 
tinuation school, unable to ascer- 
tain whether a child or young 
person who is resident within 
the district of such local educa- 
tion authority and attends such 
school attends school in con- 
formity with the Education 
Acts or any byelaws, orders, or 
other instruments made there- 
under, it shall lie on the defend- 
ant to show that the child or 
young person has attended 
school in conformity with the 
said Acts, byelaws, orders, or 
other instruments. 



No legal proceedings for non-attend- 
ance or irregular attendance at 
school shall be commenced in a 
court of summary jurisdiction by 
any person appointed to carry out 
the Education Acts or any byelaws 
made thereunder, except by the 
direction of not less than two mem- 
bers of the education committee of 
a local education authority, or of 
any sub-committee appointed by 
that committee for school attend- 
ance purposes. 



SECOND SCHEDULE. 



Enactments Repealed. 



Session and 
Chapter. 


Short Title. 


Extent of Repeal. 


33 & 34 Vict. 


The Elementary 


Section seventeen. 


c. 75. 


Education Act, 


In section twenty from 




1870. 


the beginning of sub- 
section (2) to the end 
of subsection (8). 

Section fifty- two. 

Sections sixty-seven to 
seventy- two. 

Section seventy-three. 



Section 51. 



314 ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 



A.D. 1918. 



Session and 
Chapter. 



33 & 34 Vict. 
c. 75 — 
cont. 



35 & 36 Vict. 
c. 27. 



36 & 37 Vict. 
C.86. 



39 & 40 Vict, 
c. 79. 



Short Title. 



The Elementary 
Education Act, 
1870 — cont. 



The Elementary 
Education Act 
Amendment 
Act, 1872. 

The Elementary 
Education Act, 
1873. 



The Elementary 
Education Act, 
1876. 



Extent of Repeal. 



In section seventy-four 
the words " (3) Provid- 
"ing for the remission 
"or payment of the 
"whole or any part of 
"the fees of any child 
"where the parent sat- 
" isfies the school board 
" that he is unable from 
"poverty to pay the 
"same"; and the 
words from "Provided 
"that any byelaw" 
down to the words 
" specified in such bye- 
"law." 

Section ninety-four. 

Section ninety-seven 
from " Provided that 
"no such minute" to 
the end of the section. 

The whole Act. 



Section fifteen. 

Section nineteen. 

Subsections (3) and (7) 
of section twenty-four, 
and in subsection (5) 
the words "or stating 
"that a child has been 
"certified by one of 
"Her Majesty's In- 
" spectors to have 
"reached a particular 
" standard of educa- 
tion. 

Section five. 

Section six. 

Section seven from ** Pro- 
vided that" to the 
words " by information 
"and otherwise." 

Section nine. 

Section ten. 

In section eleven the 
words "who is under 



ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 315 



Session and 
Chapter. 



39 & 40 Vict, 
c. 79 — 
eont. 



43 & 44 Vict, 
c. 23. 

53 & 54 Vict, 
c. 22. 

54 & 55 Vict, 
c. 56. 



Short Title. 



The Elementary 
Education Act, 
1876 — cont. 



The Elementary 

Education Act, 

1880. 
The Education 

Code (1890) 

Act, 1890. 
The Elementary 

Education Act, 

1891. 



A.D. 1918. 



Extent of Repeal. 



" this Act prohibited 
"from being taken into 
"full time employ- 
ment." 

Section nineteen. 

In section twenty-four 
from the beginning of 
the section down to 
"the parent of such 
"child " ; and the words 
"and the persons by 
"whom and the form 
"in which certificates 
"of the said proficiency 
"and due attendance 
"are to be granted, 
"and with respect to 
"other matters relat- 
"ing thereto"; and 
the words "and other 
"records of such pro- 
"ficiency and attend- 
"ance." 

Section twenty-eight. 

Section twenty-nine. 

Section thirty-five. 

In section thirty-seven 
the words from "And 
"every person who shall 
"fraudulently" down 
" to not exceeding four- 
"teen days." 

Section thirty-nine. 

Section forty. 

Section forty-five. 

Section forty-six. 

Section forty-seven. 

Section fifty. 

The First Schedule. 

Section four. 

Section five. 

The whole Act. 



The whole Act. 



316 ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 



A.D. 1918. 



Session and 
Chapter. 


Short Title. 


Extent of Repeal. 


55 & 56 Vict. 


The Technical 


In section ten the words 


c. 29. 


and Industrial 


"but every such con- 




Institutions 


" veyance or assurance 




Act, 1892. 


"shall be enrolled as 
" soon as may be in the 
" books of the Charity 
" Commissioners." 


56 & 57 Vict. 


The Elementary 


The whole Act. 


c. 51. 


Education 
(School At- 
tendance) Act, 
1893. 




60 & 61 Vict. 


The School Board 


The whole Act. 


c. 32 


Conference 
Act, 1897. 




62 & 63 Vict. 


The Elementary 


The whole Act. 


c. 13. 


Education 
(School At- 
tendance) Act 
(1893) Amend- 
ment Act, 1899. 




63 & 64 Vict. 


The Elementary 


Section one. 


c. 53. 


Education Act, 


In section six the 




1900. 


words "and in section 
four of the Elemen- 
tary Education Act, 
1880." 
Section seven. 


1 Edw. 7. 


The Education 


The whole Act. 


c. 11. 


Act, 1901. 




1 Edw. 7. 


The Factory and 


Sections sixty-eight to 


c. 22. 


Workshop Act, 


seventy-two except as 




1901. 


respects children law- 
fully employed in fac- 
tories and workshops 
at the commencement 
of this Act and except 
as respects Scotland 
and Ireland. 


2 Edw. 7. 


The Education 


The whole Act. 


c. 19. 


Act (1901) 
(Renewal) Act, 
1902. 




2 Edw. 7. 


The Education 


In subsection (1) of sec- 


c. 42. 


Act, 1902. 


tion two from "Pro- 
" vided that the 
"amount" to the end 
of the subsection. 



ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 317 



Session and 
Chapter. 



2 Edw. 7. 
c. 42 — 
cont 



3 Edw. 7. 
c. 10. 



3 Edw. 7. 
c. 24. 

7 Edw. 7. 
c. 43. 



Short Title. 



The Education Act, 
1902 — cont. 



The Education 
(Provision of 
Working Bal- 
ances) Act, 
1903. 

The Education 
(London) Act, 
1903. 

The Education 
(Administra- 
tive Provi- 
sions) Act, 
1907. 



A.D. 1918. 



Extent of Repeal. 



Subsection (5) of sec- 
tion seven from "and 
"in any case" to 
the end of the sub- 
section. 

Section ten. 

Section fourteen. 

Subsection (7) of section 
seventeen. 

Subsection (1) of section 
twenty-one. 

In subsection (2) thereof 
the words "or provi- 
"sional order," in sub- 
section (3) thereof the 
words "or any provi- 
"sional order made for 
" the purposes of such a 
"scheme." 

Subsections (5) and (10) 
of section twenty- 
three. 

In the Third Schedule, 
paragraph (1), from 
"except as respects" 
to the end of the para- 
graph, and paragraph 
(5). 

The whole Act. 



In the First Schedule, 
paragraphs (2) and (7). 

Section four, without 
prejudice to the legal- 
ity of anything retro- 
spectively legalised 
thereby. 

In subsection (1) of sec- 
tion fourteen the words 
" or a ground of exemp- 
" tion for the purposes 
" of section nine of the 
" latter Act." 



318 ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT OF 1918 



A.D. 1918. 



Session and 
Chapter. 


Short Title. 


Extent of Repeal. 


9 Edw. 7. 


The Education 


Section three, without 


c. 29. 


(Administra- 


prejudice to the legal- 




tive Provi- 


ity of anything retro- 




sions) Act, 


spectively legalised 




1909. 


thereby. 


6 & 6 Geo. 5. 


The Education 


The whole Act. 


c. 95. 


(Small Popula- 
tion Grants) 
Act, 1915. 




6 & 7 Geo. 5. 


The Elementary 


The whole Act. 


c. 35. 


Education 
(Fee Grant) 
Act, 1916. 





65TH CONGRESS, TJ TD IC/inn 
3D SESSION. n. IV. iO^UU. 



IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES. 

January 30, 1919. 

Mr. Towner introduced the following bill; which was referred to the 
Committee on Education and ordered to be printed. 



A BILL 

To create a Department of Education, to authorize appropriations for 
the conduct of said department, to authorize the appropriation of 
money to encourage the States in the promotion and support of 
education, and for other purposes. 

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United 
States of America in Congress assembled. That there is hereby created 
an executive department in the Government, to be called the Depart- 
ment of Education, with a Secretary of Education, who is to be the head 
thereof, to be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and con- 
sent of the Senate, who shall receive a salary of $12,000 per annum, 
and whose tenure of oflfice shall be like that of the heads of other execu- 
tive departments ; and section one hundred and fifty -eight of the Revised 
Statutes is hereby amended to include such department, and the provi- 
sions of title four of the Revised Statutes, including all amendments 
thereto, are hereby made applicable to said department. The said Secre- 
tary shall cause a seal of office to be made for such department of such de- 
vice as the President shall approve, and judicial notice shall be taken of 
the said seal. 

Sec. 2. That there shall be in said department an Assistant Secre- 
tary of Education to be appointed by the President, who shall receive 
a salary of $5,000 per year. He shall perform such duties as shall be 
prescribed by the Secretary or required by law. There shall also be 
one chief clerk and a disbursing clerk and such chiefs of bureaus and 
clerical assistants as may from time to time be authorized by Congress. 
The Auditor for the State and Other Departments shall receive and 
examine all accounts of salaries and incidental expenses of the office 
of the Secretary of Education and of all bureaus and offices under his 
direction and certify the balances arising thereon to the Division of 

319 



320 AMERICAN EDUCATION BILL 

Bookkeeping and Warrants and send forthwith a copy of each certificate 
to the Secretary of Education. 

Sec. 3. That there be transferred to the Department of Education 
the Bureau of Education and such educational war-emergency commis- 
sions or boards or educational activities already established by Act of 
Congress as in the judgment of the President should be transferred to the 
Department of Education. 

The President of the United States is hereby empowered in his dis- 
cretion to transfer to the Department of Education such offices, bureaus, 
divisions, boards, or branches of the Government connected with or 
attached to any of the executive departments, or organized independ- 
ently of any department, devoted to educational matters which concern 
the United States as a whole or the educational system of any State or 
States of the Union, which in his judgment should be controlled by, or the 
functions of which should be exercised by, the Department of Education. 

Sec. 4. That the office records and papers now on file in and per- 
taining exclusively to the business of any bureau, office, division, board, 
or branch of the public service transferred by this Act to the Depart- 
ment of Education, together with the furniture now in use in such bureau, 
office, division, board, or branch of the public service, shall be, and are 
hereby, transferred to the Department of Education. 

Sec. 5. That the Secretary of Education shall have charge, in the 
buildings or premises occupied by or assigned to the Department of 
Education, of the library, furniture, fixtures, records, and other property 
pertaining to it, or hereafter acquired for use in its business ; he shall 
be allowed to expend for periodicals and the purposes of the library and 
for rental of appropriate quarters for the accommodation of the Depart- 
ment of Education within the District of Columbia, and for all other 
incidental expenses, such sums as Congress may provide from time to 
time : Provided, however. That where any office, bureau, division, board, 
or branch of the public service transferred to the Department of Educa- 
tion by this Act, or by the President, as provided in this Act, is occupy- 
ing rented buildings or premises, it may still continue to do so until 
other suitable quarters are provided for its use : Provided further. That 
all officers, clerks, and employees now employed in or by any bureau, 
office, division, board, or branch of public service by this Act transferred 
to the Department of Education are each and all hereby transferred 
to the said Department of Education at their present grades and salaries, 
except where otherwise provided in this Act : And provided further. 
That all laws prescribing the work and defining the duties of the several 
bureaus, offices, divisions, boards, or branches of public service by this 
Act transferred to and made part of the Department of Education shall. 



AMERICAN EDUCATION BILL 321 

so far as the same are not in conflict with the provisions of this Act, 
remain in full force and effect, to be executed under the direction of the 
Secretary of Education, to whom is hereby granted definite authority 
to readjust the work of any of the said bureaus, oflBces, boards, or 
branches of public service so transferred in such way as in his judgment 
will best accomplish the purposes of this Act. 

Sec. 6. That all duties performed, and all power and authority now 
possessed or exercised by the head of any executive department in 
and over any bureau, oflBce, officer, board, division, or branch of public 
service transferred by this Act to the Department of Education, or any 
business arising therefrom or pertaining thereto, or in relation to the 
duties performed by it and authority conferred by law upon such bureau, 
office, officer, board, division, or branch of public service, whether of 
an appellate or revisory character or otherwise, shall hereafter be vested 
in and exercised by the Secretary of Education. 

Sec. 7. That the Secretary of Education shall annually at the close 
of each fiscal year make a report in writing to Congress, giving an ac- 
count of all moneys received and disbursed by him and his department, 
and describing the work done by the department. He shall also make 
other reports as hereinafter provided. He shall also, from time to time, 
make such special investigations and reports as he may be required to 
do by the President, or by Congress, or as he himself may deem neces- 
sary. 

Sec. 8. That it shall be the specific duty of the Department of Educa- 
tion to encourage the States in the development of public educational 
facilities, including public-health education, within the respective States. 

In order that the encouragement of the States in the promotion of 
education may be carried out for the best interests of education and 
public health in the respective States, the Secretary of Education, 
subject to the approval of the President, is authorized to reorganize 
such bureaus, offices, boards, divisions, or branches of public service as 
are transferred to the Department of Education. In this reorganiza- 
tion he shall consider — 

(1) The encouragement of the study and investigation of problems 
relating to the educational purposes set forth in this Act and to such 
other educational problems as may, in the judgment of the Secretary of 
Education, require attention and study. Research shall be undertaken 
directly by the Department of Education in the fields of (a) illiteracy ; 
(6) immigrant education; (c) public-school education, and especially 
rural education; (d) public-health education and recreation; (e) the 
preparation and supply of competent teachers for the public schools ; 
and (/) such other fields as come within the provisions of this Act or as 

T 



322 AMERICAN EDUCATION BILL 

may come within the provisions of other Acts of Congress relating to 
the Department of Education. 

(2) The encouragement of higher and professional education and the 
encouragement of learned societies, including the appointment of such 
commissions as the Secretary of Education may deem necessary. 

(3) The encouragement of physical and health education and recrea- 
tion, these terms to be inclusive of all public health questions relating to 
school children and to adults, and of social and recreational problems 
which relate not only to the native born but also and especially to the 
foreign-born population. 

In order to carry out the provisions of this section the Secretary of 
Education is authorized to make such appointments or recommenda- 
tions of appointments, in the same manner as provided for appointments 
in other departments, of such educational attaches to foreign em- 
bassies, and such investigators and representatives as may be needed, 
subject, however, to the appropriations that have been made or may 
be made to any bureau, office, board, division, or branch of public 
service which is transferred by this Act or may be transferred ; and where 
appropriations have not been made the appropriation provided for in 
this section nine of this Act shall be available. All provisions of Con- 
gress for encouraging the States in the promotion of education, unless 
otherwise provided by law, shall be administered through and by this 
department. 

Sec. 9. That the sum of $500,000 annually is hereby authorized 
to be available when appropriated for the purpose of paying salaries 
and conducting investigations and of paying all incidental expenses, 
including traveling expenses, and rent where necessary, and for the 
purpose of allowing the Department of Education to inaugurate a system 
of attaches to American embassies abroad to deal with educational 
matters. But this section is not to be construed as in any way inter- 
fering with any appropriation which has hitherto been made and which 
may hereafter be made to any bureau, office, division, board, or branch 
of public service, which is by this Act transferred to and made a part of 
the Department of Education, or which may hereunder be transferred 
by the President ; and said appropriations are hereby continued in full 
force, to be administered by the Secretary of Education in such manner 
as is prescribed by law. 

Sec. 10. That in order to encourage the States in the promotion of 
education, as hereinafter specified, there is hereby authorized to be 
appropriated, out of any money in the Treasury not otherwise ap- 
propriated, the following sums : For the fiscal year ending June thirtieth, 
nineteen hundred and twenty, and annually thereafter, $100,000,000. 



AMERICAN EDUCATION BILL 323 

Sec. 11. That in order to encourage the States to remove illiteracy, 
three-fortieths of the sum authorized by section ten of this Act shall be 
used for the instruction of illiterates ten years of age and over. Such in- 
struction shall deal with the common-school branches and the duties 
of citizenship, and when necessary shall prepare for some definite occu- 
pation. Said sum shall be apportioned to the States in the proportion 
which their respective illiterate populations of ten years of age and over 
(not including foreign-born illiterates) bear to such total illiterate popula- 
tion of the United States, not including outlying possessions, according 
to the last preceding census of the United States. 

Sec. 12. That in order to encourage the States in the Americaniza- 
tion of immigrants, three-fortieths of the sum authorized by section ten 
of this Act shall be used to teach immigrants ten years of age and over 
to speak and read the English language and the duties of citizenship, 
and to develop among them an appreciation of and respect for the civic 
and social institutions of the United States. The said sum shall be ap- 
portioned to the States in the proportions which their respective foreign- 
born populations bear to the total foreign-born population of the United 
States, not including outlying possessions, according to the last preceding 
census of the United States. 

Sec. 13. That in order to encourage the States to equalize educa- 
tional opportimities, five-tenths of the sum authorized by section ten 
of this Act shall be used in public schools of less than college grade for 
the partial payment of teachers' salaries, providing better instruction, 
extending school terms, and for improving rural schools and schools 
in sparsely settled localities, and otherwise for providing equally good 
schools and teachers for the children in the several States. The said 
sum shall be apportioned to the States in the proportions which the 
numbers of teachers in the public schools of the respective States bear 
to the total number of public-school teachers in the United States, 
not including outlying possessions, said apportionment to be based 
upon figures collected by the Department of Education : Provided, how- 
ever. That no State shall share in the apportionment provided by this 
section of this Act unless such State shall require every public-school 
district to maintain a legal school for at least twenty-four weeks in each 
year, and unless such State shall have enacted and enforced an adequate 
compulsory school-attendance law, and unless such State shall have 
enacted and enforced laws requiring that the basic language of instruc- 
tion in the common-school branches in all schools, public and private 
and parochial, shall be the English language only. 

Sec. 14. That in order to encourage the States in the promotion 
of physical and health education and recreation two-tenths of the sum 



324 AMERICAN EDUCATION BILL 

authorized by section ten of this Act shall be used for physical educa- 
tion and recreation, the medical and dental examination of children of 
school age, the determination of mental and physical defects in such 
children, the employment of school nurses, the establishment and 
maintenance of school dental clinics, and the instruction of the people 
in the principles of health and sanitation. The said sum shall be ap- 
portioned to the States in the proportions which their respective entire 
populations bear to the total population of the United States, not in- 
cluding'^outlying possessions, according to the last preceding census of 
the United States. 

Sec. 15. That in order to encourage the States in preparing teachers 
for the schools, particulariy rural schools, three-twentieths of the sum 
authorized by section ten of this Act shall be used to prepare teachers, 
to encourage a more neariy universal preparation of prospective teachers, 
to extend the facilities for the improvement of teachers already in service, 
to encourage through the establishment of scholarships and otherwise 
a greater number of talented young people to make adequate prepara- 
tion for public-school service, and otherwise to provide an increased 
number of trained and competent teachers. The said sum shall be ap- 
portioned to the States in the proportion which the numbers of teachers 
in the public schools of the respective States bear to the total number of 
public-school teachers in the United States, not including outlying pos- 
sessions, said apportionment to be based on figures collected by the 
Department of Education. 

Sec. 16. That in the event the allotments under sections eleven, 
twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen to any State aggregate less than 
$20,000 per annum and said State is willing to meet all the conditions 
of this Act and to provide $1 for each dollar of Federal money, either 
from State or local sources, or both, to the sum of $20,000 per annum, 
the Secretary of Education is authorized to make said allotment; and 
in order to guarantee to any State a minimum of not less than $20,000, 
provided said State meets the conditions of this Act as herein specified, 
an additional sum of $500,000 or as much thereof as may be needed, 
is hereby authorized annually. 

Sec. 17. That in order to secure the benefits of the authorization 
made in section ten of this Act and of all or any of apportionments 
made in sections eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen 
of this Act any State shall, through the legislative authority thereof, 
accept the provisions of this Act and designate its chief State educa- 
tional authority, and give to the same all necessary power to act as 
herein provided in connection with the Department of Education in 
the administration of this Act in so far as it relates to the aiding of the 



AMERICAN EDUCATION BILL 325 

States in the promotion of education. In any State in which the legis- 
lature does not meet in nineteen hundred and nineteen, if the governor 
of that State, so far as he is authorized to do so, shall accept the provi- 
sions of this Act and designate the State's chief educational authority to 
act in connection with the Department of Education, the said Depart- 
ment of Education shall recognize such designation by the governor 
for the purposes of this Act until the legislature of such State meets 
in due course and has been in session sixty days. iVny State may accept 
the provisions of any one or more of the respective apportionments 
herein authorized and may defer the acceptance of any one or more of 
said apportionments. In the acceptance of the provisions of this Act 
the legislature shall designate and appoint as custodian for all funds re- 
ceived as apportionments under the provisions of this Act its State 
treasurer, who shall receive and provide for the proper custody and 
disbursement of all money paid to the State from such apportionments, 
said disbursements to be made from warrants duly drawn by the State's 
chief educational authority which has been duly designated to act in 
connection with the Department of Education as provided in this sec- 
tion of this Act. 

Sec. 18. That the Secretary of Education is authorized to pre- 
scribe a plan of keeping accounts of educational expenditures for use 
in the several States in so far as such expenditures relate to the provi- 
sions of this Act. The Secretary may prescribe or approve the forms to 
be used in keeping such school accounts and the making of such school 
records as in his judgment are required to insure the proper administra- 
tion of the provisions of this Act. He shall appoint an auditor to have 
charge of such accounting in the several States and of the examination 
of such accounts, and he shall appoint such assistant auditors as may 
be necessary to aid in examining and verifying said accounts showing 
expenditure of moneys by the States for the purpose of meeting the 
provisions of this Act and of examining such other educational records 
as may be required. 

Sec. 19, That in order to secure the benefits of the authorizations in 
sections ten and sixteen of this Act and of all or any of the apportionments 
made in sections eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen of this 
Act the State's chief educational authority which has been duly desig- 
nated to act in connection with the Department of Education, as pro- 
vided in section seventeen of this Act, shall present to the Secretary of 
Education plans and regulations for carrpng out the provisions of this 
Act in said State, which plans shall specifically show courses of study and 
the standards of teacher preparation to be maintained. If said plans 
show that the State has in good faith made provisions for carrying out 



326 AMERICAN EDUCATION BILL 

the purposes and complying with the conditions of this Act, in so far 
as they relate to aiding such State in the promotion of education, the 
Secretary of Education shall apportion to the said State such fund or 
funds as said State may be entitled to under this Act : Provided, however. 
That no money appropriated shall be paid from any fund in any year to 
any State, unless a sum equally as large has been provided by said State, 
or by local authorities, or by both, for the removal of illiteracy, for the 
Americanization of immigrants, for the equalization of educational 
opportunites, for physical education, for teacher preparation, or such 
other purpose as the case may be, and said sum appropriated by the 
State shall not be less for the equalization of educational opportunities, 
the promotion of physical and health education, and the preparation of 
teachers, than that appropriated for the same purpose for the fiscal 
year next preceding the adoption of this Act : And provided further. 
That no such sum shall be used by any State, county, district, or local 
authority, directly or indirectly, for the purchase, rental, erection, pre- 
servation, or repair of any building or equipment, or for the purchase 
or rental of land, or for the support of any religious or privately en- 
dowed, owned, or conducted school or college, but only for schools 
entirely owned and controlled and conducted by the State or county 
or local authority, as may be provided for under the laws of said State. 

Sec. 20. That the Secretary of the Treasury is hereby authorized 
to pay quarterly, on the first day of July, October, January, and April, 
to the treasurer of any State entitled to any apportionment, such ap- 
portionment as is properly certified to him by the Secretary of Educa- 
tion. Wherever any part of the fund apportioned annually to any 
State for any of the purposes named in sections eleven, twelve, thirteen, 
fourteen, and fifteen of this Act has not been expended for said purpose, 
a sum equal to such unexpended part shall be deducted from the next 
succeeding annual apportionment made to said State for said purpose. 
The Secretary of Education may withhold the apportionment of moneys 
to any State whenever it shall be determined that such moneys are not 
being expended for the purposes and under the conditions of this Act. 
If any portion of the moneys received by the treasurer of a State under 
this Act for any of the purposes herein provided shall, by action or 
contingency, be diminished or lost, it shall be replaced by such State, 
and until so replaced no subsequent apportionment for such purpose 
shall be paid to such State. 

Sec. 21. That every State accepting the provisions of this Act 
shall, not later than September first of each year, make a report to the 
Secretary of Education, showing in such detail as he may prescribe the 
work done in said State in carrying out the purposes and provisions of 



AMERICAN EDUCATION BILL 327 

this Act, and the receipt and expenditure of moneys paid to said State 
under the conditions of this Act. If any State fails to make said report 
within the time prescribed the Secretary of Education may, in his dis- 
cretion, discontinue immediately the payment of any moneys which 
have been apportioned under the terms of this Act to said State. The 
Secretary of Education, not later than December first of each year, shall 
make a report to Congress on the administration of sections ten, eleven, 
twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, 
and twenty of this Act, and shall include in said report a summary of the 
reports made to him by the several States. The Secretary of Educa- 
tion shall, at the same time, make such recommendations to define 
further the purposes and plans for Federal encouragement of the States 
in education as will, in his judgment, improve the administration of 
the moneys appropriated under sections ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, 
fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen of this Act. 

Sec. 22. That this Act shall take effect March fourth, nineteen 
hundred and nineteen, and all Acts and parts of Acts inconsistent with 
this Act are here repealed. 

H. R. 15400 — 3 



EDUCATION IN THE NEW 
PRUSSIA 

Before the German Revolution was a month old the reform of the 
whole system of education became a burning question. The Socialist 
Herr Hanisch became Prussian Kultur-Minister, thus assuming re- 
sponsibility for education, the relations between State and Church, 
and Kultur generally. The whole political development of Germany 
is largely dependent upon the solution of problems affecting religion ; 
the struggle between Socialism and Lutheranism will be considerable 
and the struggle between Socialism and Roman Catholicism, which in 
Germany is an immensely powerful political organization, may in the 
end be decisive. 

Herr Hanisch set to work immediately to organize the most sweep- 
ing changes ; and by the end of November the Socialist Press was allowed 
to publish the following remarkable list of the thirty-two points of his 

program : — 

A. General 

1. The separation of Church and State has been settled in principle. 
2. Rehgion has ceased to be an examination subject, and the introduc- 
tion of unsectarian moral teaching is being prepared. 3. Supervision 
of schools by the local clergy and participation of the clergy in the 
district inspections are abolished. 4. Mixed education of boys and 
girls has already been introduced in some schools. 5. Teachers and 
scholars receive powers of self-government. 6. All chauvinism is 
banished from the instruction, and especially from the instruction in 
history. 7. Prussia will propose the assembly of a high school con- 
ference for the whole Empire. 8. The uniform school (Einheitsschule) 
is secured, and the abolition of all class schools will be begun imme- 
diately. 9. The oflfice of Rector will be deprived of its autocratic 
character and built up upon a collegiate basis. 10. The school author- 
ities are instructed to promote among teachers' unions and at official 
conferences discussions of educational and cultural questions of policy 

328 



EDUCATION IN THE NEW PRUSSIA 329 

in the spirit of the new age. 11. The Ministry of Education will 
include as representatives of the Socialist Party two Ministers, one 
Under-Secretary, one principal adviser and two assistant advisers. 
12. Touch will be kept with champions of the new movement through- 
out the whole country, and a list will be made of suitable candidates for 
freshening the body of officials and teachers. 13. The leaving examina- 
tion from the secondary schools will be transformed, and the number 
of examinations will be reduced. 14. The Prussian Ministry of Educa- 
tion claims a share of the confiscated Royal castles for the purposes of 
national education — as training schools, boarding schools, model 
seminaries, museums and national high schools. 15. Physical culture 
has been deprived of its military character. 

B. Teachers 

16. No teacher may in future be compelled to give religious educa- 
tion. 17. It has been proposed to the Ministry of War that all teachers 
shall be released immediately from their military obligations. 18. Work 
for the willing ! Immediate provision of employment for teachers who 
return from the field by reducing the size of classes, filling of all vacant 
posts, and establishment of special courses. 19. The amnesty will be 
applied to all teachers who have received disciplinary punishment. 
20. Teachers who have been punished for their political or religious con- 
victions are to be reinstated. 21. The teachers will have representa- 
tives in the Government and in the school administration. The Socialist 
teacher Menzel has been appointed principal adviser in the ministry 
of Education. 22. Tried teachers will be appointed to local inspector- 
ships of schools without special examinations. 



C. Universities 

23. Prominent representatives of scientific Socialism and of other 
tendencies which have hitherto been systematically excluded are to be 
appointed to university chairs. 24. A system of national high schools 
is to be built up on large lines, and to be placed in organic connection 
with existing schools and high schools. 25. The reorganization of the 
technical high schools will be effected in close connection with the uni- 
versities. 26. The social, legal, and financial position of the assistant 
teachers in universities (Privatdozenten) is to be raised. 27. Freedom 
of doctrine in the universities is to be rid of its last fetters. 28. Pro- 
fessorial chairs and research institutes for sociology will be established. 



330 EDUCATION IN THE NEW PRUSSIA 



D. General Culture 

29. The theaters will be put under the Ministry of Education. The 
theater censorship has been abolished. 30. Opportunity for work, and 
relief where necessary, will be given to unemployed artists and writers 
on their return from the field. 31. The system of appointments will 
be reformed in association with the organizations of artists of every 
school. 32. The Royal theaters will become national theaters, and the 
Court orchestras will become national orchestras. 

A few days after the issue of these thirty-two points Herr Hanisch 
published a further communication, which shows that he is anxious to 
guard against the accusation that he is abolishing religious education 
altogether. His intention seems to be that time shall be set apart for 
religious education ; that teachers who are willing to do so shall continue 
to give religious education ; and that the local clergy shall be permitted 
either to give religious education themselves in the schools, or to employ 
the regular teachers to give it. 



INDEX 



Absolutism, in education, 246 

Acton, quoted, 192 

yEschines, 2 

Aims, 216, 265 

Alexander, quoted, 231 et seq. 

American education bill, 236 

Americanization, 216 

Aristotle, 49; quoted, 104; 156 

Arithmetic, its value, 21 ; made un- 
necessarily difficult, 60 ; superior- 
ity of the metric system to Eng- 
lish tables, 67; 259 

Arnold, Matthew, quoted, 178 

Azan, Lieutenant Colonel Paul, 
quoted, 244 

Bacon, quoted, 12 ; 251 

Baillet, quoted, 108 

Benn, Ernest J. P., quoted, 269 

Birth rate, what is desirable, 35 

Browning, quoted, 16, 158 

Bryce, 166; quoted, 173, 177; 181 

Child, belongs to the state, 19 ; the 
German theory of his value, 27; 
another view, 29 et seq. ; the in- 
numerable company of children, 
31 ; another way of imaging their 
life, 32 ; exposure of. forbidden to 
the merciful, 34 ; the most im- 
portant years of, 36; "the fine 
child at Westminster," 37; chil- 
dren the great problem of life, 58 ; 
the child's attitude toward school 
work, 60 

China, 190 



Christianity, the lessons of, 204; 
its program, 208 

Classics, the classics, 166 

Coefficient of correlation, 143, 145 
et seq. 

Compulsory education, 18 

Comte, 111; quoted, 121, 142 

Concord, 191 

Coover, li5 et seq. 

Course of study, 57; reconstruc- 
tion of, 262; teachers must 
make, 262 

Curtius, 201 

d'Alembert, quoted, 107 

Dearborn, 89, 125 

Democracy, the education of, 210; 

239 ; in education, 269 
Descartes, quoted, 107 ^ seq. 
Dewey, 7 ; quoted, 83 ; 91 ; quoted, 

113, 161 
Dharmapala, transplants Booker T. 

Washington's work to Benares, 

47 
Discovery, the greatest ever made, 

19 
Doyle, Arthur Conan, quoted, 199 

Education, what it is, 4 ; rooted in 
unselfishness, 5 ; its object to 
serve, 6 ; not the imparting of 
universal knowledge, 12; not 
the making over of mind, 15 ; the 
problem of, 23 ; to unify peoples, 
24 ; but one ideal of, 26 ; of the 
child society's supreme con- 
structive activity, 40 ; England's 
331 



332 



INDEX 



attitude toward, 42; the voca- 
tionalizing of the dominant note, 
42; will it lessen idealism, 43; 
the kind in our missionary school, 
43; must all be vocational, 47; 
practical until 1750, 49; why 
men oppose practical, 50; the 
intellectualist's view of, 51 ; ef- 
fect of aimlessness of general 
upon the student, 52; "education 
is linguistic," 70 ; specific, 91, 150 ; 
a conscious process, 95, 129; 
Plato's definition of, 140; reli- 
gious education and the war, 197 ; 
religious education, 204 ; German 
education, 209 et seq., 230 et seq., 
247 ; English Education Act, 213 ; 
American education, 214, 224; 
reconstruction in American edu- 
cation, 235, 256 ; American edu- 
cation bill, 236 ; shortcomings of, 
iS7 et seq.; absolutism in, 246; 
aims in instruction, 261 ; de- 
mocracy in, 269 

Efficiency, 25, 155 

Elementary schools, 217 et seq. 

Emerson, 46, 175 

Engel, quoted, 27, 33, 34 

England, England's attitude toward 
education, 42 

English, translation English, 71; 
Education Act, 213 

Eugenists, their program, 33 

Exposure, child, forbidden to the 
merciful, 34 

Faculties, there are none, 92, 111 
et seq.; in warring, 123 

Fichte, 1 

Finley, 213 

Fisher, Herbert, 212 

Flexner, 170 

Foch, Ferdinand, quoted on ob- 
jectives, 249; 267 

Formal discipline, the doctrine of, 
73; disciphne "the central prob- 



lem of educational psychology, " 
76; history of the doctrine, 76 
et seq. ; the doctrine challenged, 
80 et seq. ; experimental studies, 
81 ; the question which is being 
investigated, 82; what the ex- 
periments show, 84 ; has perhaps 
helped no one, 93; not proven, 
93 ; the theory of, 99 ; 158 

France, 5, 213 

Freud, 36 

Future, the future, 270 

Germany, 209 ; the Germans, 216 ; 
German Education, 209 et seq., 
230 et seq., 247 

Geography, 10 et seq., 65; defini- 
tions in, 69 et seq., 223, 260 

Goethe, 43 

Grammar, its origin, 61 ; its diffi- 
culty, 62 et seq. ; impossible for 
children to comprehend, 68 

Green, J. R., quoted, 193 

Hadley, 178 

Haldane, quoted, 185 

Hamilton, Sir William, 105 et seq., 

133 
Hancock, 122 
Harvard University, 3 
Hendrick, quoted, 127 
Herbart, 79 

Hewlett, Maurice, quoted, 37 
Historian, the historian, 187 
History, 182; can it predict, 185; 

188 et seq. ; the kind we want, 193 
Humanism, 176 
Huxley, 111 

Ideals, 2 et seq. ; of education, there 
is but one, 26 

James, 80 ; quoted, 85, 160 

Japan, 190 

Jones, Sir Henry, quoted, 19 

Jouffrey, 206 

Juvenal, quotation from, 32 



INDEX 



333 



Keyser, quoted, 100 et seq. ; 105, 133 
Knowledge, does not exist for its 
own sake, 7; the pragmatic 
view of, 8 ; need for selection, 9 ; 
which is, 12; defined, 17; not 
for its own sake, 130 et seq., 156, 
221 ; the American theory of, 257 

Labor, its problems, 269 
Language, does not impart thought, 

14 
Latin, 71 ; translation English, 71 ; 

its mental training, 72 
Lessons, must be simplified, 67; 

of Christianity, 204 
Lewis, 115; quoted, 116; 124, 143 
Lincoln, his method of studying, 

149 
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 166 ; quoted, 

168 

Maine, Sir Henry Sumner, 174 

Mathematics, the value of, 101 ; 
Socrates' view of, 102; Plato's 
reason for studying, 103; the 
study of, 122 ; does not train the 
mind universally, 148 

McNab, quoted, 254 

Memory, 154 

Method, scientific, 153; 251 ; of the 
inventor, 252 

Meuman, 88 

Mexico, 20 et seq., 189, 260 

Mill, John Stuart, 21, 134 ; quoted, 
135 et seq. 

Modernism, 179 

Moore, Charles N., 120 

Moritz, a reply to, 129 

Morwitz, 121 

Mothers, a school for, 39 

Motor Transport Corps, 254 

Munsterberg, quoted, 154 

Music, a most important subject, 25 

National Education Association, 
235 



Nazianzen, Gregory, quoted, 180 
Nietzsche, quoted, 199 et seq.; 217 
Normal School, 223 et seq. 
Numbering, 21 

Objective, the objective, 249 et seq. ; 
working by the objective, illus- 
trations, 253 et seq. 

Organizing, 229 

Pan-Germanism, 201 

Pascal, quoted, 109 et seq. 

Philosophy, 220 

Plato, on clinging to eternal life, 30 ; 
the influences which should sur- 
round the young, 36 ; reason for 
studying mathematics, 103 ; 139, 
his definition of education, 140; 
quoted, 163; 180 

Political theories, tested, 21 

President of the United States, 241 

Public schools, 215 

Pyle, quoted, 161 

Quintilian, quoted, 38; 164 

Reading, its value, 20; 152, 218 

Reconstruction, in American educa- 
tion, 235 et seq. ; 256, of the course 
of study, 262 

Religion, 198; that of Israel, 202 
et seq. 

Religious education, 197, 204, 206 
et seq., 210 et seq. 

Root, Elihu, 243 

Rousseau, 175 

Rugg, quoted, 84, 85, 125; 143, 
144 et seq. 

Saba tier, quoted, 205 et seq. 

School year, 226, 267 

Shooting, 253 

Shorey, 166; quoted, 167, 169; 172 

et seq. 
Sleight, 86; quoted, 89; 125, 127 
Socrates, 18, 48, 102 



INDEX 



Spearman, quoted, 52, 86; 127 
Spelling, 9, 65 ; superiority of 

Spanish to English spelling, 67; 

222, 259 
Spencer, quoted, 135 
State, two notions of, 27 et seq.; 

German theory of, 157 
Stevenson, Robert Louis, quoted, 

204 
Strabo, 163; quoted, 164 
Students' Army Training Corps, 

240 et seq. 
Studies, all should have names 

ending in ing, 17; as ends in 

themselves, 95; as means, 97; 

study of mathematics, 122; why 

we want them, 183; 217 et seq. ; 

no magic in, 220 

Teachers, must make the course 

of study, 262 
Tests, standard, 64 
Theories, political, tested, 21 
Training, what it means, 245 et seq. ; 

what America has learned about 

it, 252 
Transfer, 126, 171 
Transferists, 123 
Troeltsch, Ernest, quoted, 230 



United States, where is it, 3; 194 
et seq. ; American education, 214 ; 
what it has learned about train- 
ing, 252 

Vocation, its meaning, 53; voca- 
tionalizing, 47 

Walker, Francis A., quoted, 259 

Wanamaker, K. M., 149 

War, the nature of this one, 27; 
184, 212 

Washburn, Margaret Floy, 155 

Washington, Booker T., his con- 
tribution, 45 

Wells, H. G., 199 

Whitehead, A. N., quoted, 128, 
151 

Whitman, Walt, 270 

Words, how they enslave mankind, 
69 

Work, gives value in the social 
equation, develops genuine reli- 
gion, 54 et seq. 

Writing, what it contributes, 21 

Xenophon, 163 

Young, quoted, 110, 134 



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